The gray smoke of clouds floated past the window at a leisurely pace. There was nothing quite as soothing as flying, nothing that provided such a sharp, comforting contrast between illusion and reality. On the inside, the calm hum of air filtration systems and the predictable routine of flight attendants and the bland monotone of the pilots; on the outside, the violence of metal and jet fuel ripping the sky apart, cutting up the delicate chemicals of the atmosphere in an effort to hurry people to places they usually didn’t want to go. Desmond loved being lifted out of his life, plucked up into the chilly ether where everything was clean and carefully controlled and simultaneously safe and dangerous, where you could travel at extraordinary speeds through subzero temperatures without effort or discomfort, without even having to press your foot on a pedal. And if ever there was a moment when he longed to be rescued from the foundering boat of his life and strapped into a comfortable chair, it was now. How many mistakes could he make thirty thousand feet above his whole world?
Two female flight attendants were standing in the aisle one row in front of them, loudly discussing the injustice of the airline’s scheduling policies. It was true that all the glamour had been drained from air travel, but that only made it as dull, in a reassuring way, as a trip to the Grand Union.
“I’m sick of it,” one of them said. “I’m sick of being pushed around.”
“No kidding,” the scrawnier of the two drawled. “And yesterday they drug-tested me again. That’s twice this month.”
“Oh shit.” The untested woman reached a pale, braceleted arm into the overhead bin and tossed a pillow, doll-sized and stiff, to the passenger seated below.
“The whole thing was so humiliating I went out and had a complete blowout last night.”
Jane shoved a magazine into the seat back in front of her. “Aren’t they supposed to be discussing something important right now?”
“Your lunch?”
“I was thinking about emergency landing procedures and flotation devices, but lunch would be nice. What have you got to read over there?”
He handed her a copy of the same airline magazine she’d just been looking at, and she flipped through the pages as if she’d never seen them before. She was nervous. At the airport, she’d stepped out of the taxi and dropped her purse onto the sidewalk and dropped her keys as she was stooping to pick up the purse and dropped her purse again as she was stooping to pick up the keys. If he had to put money on it, he’d guess that she, like the emaciated flight attendant, wouldn’t pass any drug tests with flying colors today. “Take care of Jane,” Thomas had told him yesterday morning. “She likes to boss people around, but underneath, she needs someone to watch out for her.” And then, with great tenderness, as if he were revealing to Desmond one of his wife’s most lovable traits, he said, “She wouldn’t admit it, but she hates to fly.”
A smile had lingered on Thomas’s face for a moment, and Desmond had felt as if a curtain had been pulled aside and he was being offered a glimpse into a hidden corner of their marriage. He’d assumed that Thomas was the one who needed to be coddled and babied—Thomas with his shiny, baby head and his overbearing wife and his mother in the carriage house and his monstrous child whom he adored—but now he saw that was Jane’s perception of things. In reality, it was Thomas, solid and steadfast and dull, who ended up protecting Jane from her own worst impulses. In preparation for this trip, she’d had her hair cut shorter and permed, and it made her look defenseless, the way people always look when their efforts at dressing up produce unflattering results and their desire for beauty is revealed while the beauty itself remains elusive. The way he looked, no doubt, in the overpriced gray Armani jersey he’d bought yesterday in a moment of shopping selfindulgence that instantly soured into self-loathing. The back of Jane’s neck was exposed and the perm was so recent, her hair appeared to fit her head badly, like a hat she’d bought for the color, despite the fact that it was the wrong size. She kept pulling at the curls in back, perhaps trying to loosen them up. She had on a gray flannel suit, just right for November in Boston, even this warm November, but a big mistake for Gulf City, Florida.
The plane bumped, as if its bottom had just scraped over a boulder, then rose up. The cabin was shot through with milky sunlight, and when Desmond looked out again, there was a field of dark blue beneath them. They were over the ocean now, making their way south along the coast. Within minutes, they’d be flying over Manhattan. For one reckless moment, he imagined that if he gazed out the window, he’d spot Russell down there, walking along Broadway, maybe reading the letter Desmond had written after visiting Rosemary and had finally put into the mailbox.
He’d gone through eight drafts of the thing. He started out with a raw, emotional plea he’d typed in a wine-fueled frenzy of sentimentality. “I don’t care what you’ve done or with whom, I don’t want you to move out, if that’s what you’re contemplating. I’ll be back in a little more than a month. We’ll work it out then. Let me finish this semester and finish this book. I feel certain I’m very close to finding what I’m missing, and all I’m asking for is the quiet space to do it.” The next morning he’d woken up, reread the page-and-a-half letter and found it a bit too conciliatory. It wasn’t strictly true that he didn’t care what Russell had been up to. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing, or with whom . . .” he revised. That afternoon, as he was reading over the second draft in his office at Deerforth, he’d been struck by the pleading tone in the part about finishing his book. He scratched out the “quiet space” and penciled in “I need a little fresh air, too.” At midnight, sitting at his desk, he’d retyped the fourth draft. “I know what you’ve been up to.” And the next morning: “If you want to move out so badly that you’d consider returning to that cell on C . . .” Over lunch, red pencil in hand: “I haven’t exactly been crying into my pillow every night, you know.” The many drafts were so jumbled in his mind, he wasn’t entirely sure what was in the version he’d mailed, but he was fairly certain there was some veiled reference to a handsome, bisexual architect, and to the wonderful emotional freedom he was experiencing now that he could lay claim to a larger portion of his own identity.
Jane grabbed the armrests of her seat. “Where did Tim end up?” she asked.
“Somewhere in the back,” Desmond said. “I can’t figure him out. I don’t know if he’s a dolt or a genius, although I have the feeling it’s either one or the other, no middle ground.”
“He’s twenty,” Jane said, “meaning he was raised in a completely different culture from the one we know, so you and I have no basis for judging his intelligence. He might as well be a different species. Within ten years, he’ll be ruling the world with his computer and media talents and we’ll be extinct. We think in terms of pages, he thinks in terms of screens—computer, TV, movie. And therein lies the future.”
Desmond supposed there was some truth to this, and yet what fascinated him about Tim, and about so many of the students in their late teens and early twenties he’d taught over the years, was that for all their computer savvy and sophistication, for all the cultural advantages and freedoms they’d been handed growing up in a time of peace and prosperity and sexual liberation, they seemed, in most emotional ways, to be right back in the 1950s, obsessing about a Saturday night date or an unreturned phone call, a crush or a crisis of insignificant proportions. If anything could save the human race for another couple of generations—unlikely, but not impossible—it wouldn’t be advances in technology and scientific intelligence, but this lack of emotional development that pulled people back to their simplest needs and desires and left them stumbling over their deepest insecurities. In the end, there was nothing more compellingly human than that.
“I’ll bet Chloe is up front eating lobster,” Jane said. She sighed and handed the magazine back to Desmond. “I’ve never liked lobster. And lately, I can’t even look at the poor things, trapped in their holding tanks at the supermarket.”
In the airport lounge, Chloe had started chatting with a gray-haired businessman from Atlanta who, ten minutes later, had her ticket upgraded to first class so they could continue what must have been a riveting conversation. Chloe had seemed genuinely surprised by the attention: “Wasn’t that nice of him?” she’d asked as she was gathering up her things for early boarding.
“Just for the record,” Jane said, “no rich older man ever found me so interesting or attractive he offered me a first-class ticket. You have to be exactly the right blend of pushy, pretty, and emotionally needy, and I’ve never been good at keeping the pieces of my personality well balanced.”
“Just for the record,” Desmond said, “you seem very well balanced to me.”
In the end, being a good friend usually came down to talking people out of their perceptions of themselves, especially the accurate ones.
“You wouldn’t think I was a hopeless alcoholic if I ordered a Bloody Mary, would you?” Jane asked.
She was beginning to sound maudlin. People often get maudlin when they board airplanes and leave everything of importance behind them and can’t decide whether they’re afraid of crashing or hoping for it. When the drink finally came, Jane mixed together the tomato juice and the miniature bottle of vodka with the precision of a chemist, took a sip, and began rummaging through her enormous leather purse. “You know,” she said, “I truly cannot remember the last time I had a whole day in which I wasn’t responsible for doing a single thing.” She took out a small vial of prescription pills and popped one into her mouth. “Vitamins,” she explained. As she was about to put the bag under the seat, she reached into it and hauled out an appointment book, overstuffed with sheets of stationery, newspaper clippings, ragged slips of paper. She opened it up randomly and a few unevenly folded pieces of paper fell onto her lap. “This is what my week usually looks like,” she said. “Gerald’s doctor appointments, my shrink appointments, my shameful secrets. Not that I have any.” She handed the book to Desmond. “It’s perfect airplane reading.”
It wasn’t possible that the drink and the pill had taken effect already, but Jane seemed to be sinking more deeply into her seat. As long as he didn’t end up having to carry her off the plane, he didn’t mind. Once, many years earlier, he’d been involved with a pothead boyfriend who’d been so easily amused by lighting up a joint, he required blissfully little in the way of gifts, expensive entertainment, or conversation. If Jane had offered, he wouldn’t have turned down one of her little yellow pills. She fumbled with the seat until she was partly reclining, then let her head drop back and her eyes close. The book was a hodgepodge of notes, most of them typed or scribbled on loose paper; the pages of the memo book itself were practically untouched. There were reminders about bills and facials and dinner guests, notes about Dinner Conversation, shopping lists, and menus. It wasn’t possible that something this disorganized could help clarify anything for anyone; it wasn’t an appointment book but an admission of defeat; handing it to him was a cry for help.
“You have an awful lot going on,” he said.
“I do, don’t I? And that’s one book of many.” She turned her head toward Desmond, her face resting in a nest of her too-curly hair. “The lure of the fresh, naked page gets to me at least once a month, the hope that starting a new appointment book will be the same thing as starting a new life.”
One thin strip of paper was entitled “Things For Gerald.” A list of toys and books she intended to buy for Christmas or birthday presents, he assumed; on closer inspection, it proved to be something else. “Spontaneity, joie de vivre, physical confidence.” Good luck finding any of those things in the aisles of Toys “R” Us. That was about as likely as him finding the character traits he’d been searching for in bottles of organic sugar pills and herbal extracts suspended in alcohol. The list covered half the page. At the bottom she’d written, in tiny print, the word “smiles.” This was exactly the kind of scrap he would have celebrated finding if he’d been writing a biography of Jane, but with her sitting next to him, about to fall into a drug-induced sleep, it was embarrassingly intimate.
He reached over to put the book on her tray table, but she touched his hand lightly. “Keep it for me?” The tone of her voice, soft and girlish, made it sound like a plea. “It would be such a vacation for me to not have to think about any of that for the next few days.”
“It’s only fair to warn you,” he said, “that when I’m alone in my room, I’ll probably pore over every word, snooping into your life. It’s part of my job.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s all written in code, and lately I’ve been having trouble keeping the code straight. You’re welcome to all of it, Desmond. I trust you.” A few minutes later, she added, in a voice heavy with sleep, “If you discover anything interesting in there, be sure to let me know, especially if it turns out I’m a halfway decent person.”
The plane flew into a patch of turbulence and then got caught in an updraft that lifted it to a higher altitude. Two men in T-shirts and shorts who’d looked drunk as they’d stumbled into their seats, whooped with delight as if they were on one more ride at an amusement park. Jane had fallen asleep, and as they bumped higher into the sky, her head rolled gently from side to side, barely making a dent in her new curls.
As recently as three years ago, the last time Desmond had visited Anderton’s daughter, Lorna, and her collection of memorabilia, this stretch of the Florida panhandle had been a piney wonderland of shabby motels and tourist cottages scattered along the beaches and roadsides as if they’d been dumped there from a fast-moving truck. There were dark bars and unwholesome, oddball restaurants with gaudy signs. “Home of the Topless Oyster,” “All You Can Eat Shrimp,” “Ho-Made Po-Boys.” He’d been fascinated with the run-down glamour of the place, imagining that if he were a completely different person—a married truck driver from southern Georgia, let’s say—he’d come here to spend vacations with the family. Now even that shaky fantasy couldn’t support its own unlikely weight. The area around the airport was being brutally developed with big concrete hotels thrown up by multinational chains and strip malls with the usual cast of retail characters and restaurants. It was as if some fungus had arrived in the hold of a plane, transforming the landscape close to the airport first, and starting to spread.
Jane was comatose in the passenger seat of the van, and Chloe and Tim were in back, playing an electronic game that made strange bleeps and elicited groans.
He supposed people found the growing uniformity of the world comforting. You didn’t have to react to this landscape or these shops or restaurants because they were all identical to ones you’d seen thousands of times before in hundreds of other places. The food you bought at the big chain restaurants was so familiar, you didn’t have to worry yourself with actually tasting it. The world was bursting at the seams with information and “content,” information’s brand-new sibling, and in order to assimilate all of that, you had to neutralize as much sensory input as you could.
Fortunately, as they got closer to Gulf City, the development thinned, leaving more of the seedy disrepair he remembered fondly from his last visit—roadside bars and motels, a few weed-choked vacant lots. A naval base that had been in Gulf City for decades had closed at the end of the 1980s, and the town was still reeling from the abandonment, refusing to pick up the pieces and start anew, like a bitter husband who couldn’t accept that his wife had left him. Russell had accompanied him on that other visit and had declared Gulf City, “a real place, even if it is a really awful one.” And yet all of it, the drinking dives and dying malls, the hotsheets motels and the little restaurants named after the owner, were circumscribed by the incongruous beauty of the wide, green expanse of the Gulf waters and the white sand that seemed to stretch for miles.
Chloe had booked them into the Gulf City Hotel, which turned out to be a flat-roofed two-story motel painted in uneven shades of brown that reminded Desmond of pecan shells. The V-shaped building was broken into two long wings that angled out from either side of a glassed-in coffee shop and office, and it seemed to be embracing the parking lot, and, by inference, your most sacred possession: your car. Except today, there were only three cars in the lot; not much to protect.
As soon as she spotted the place, Chloe put down the electronic game and started making bleeps of her own. “This isn’t a hotel,” she cried. “It’s barely a motel. Talk about false advertising!”
“If you ran a place that looked like this,” Desmond said, “would you advertise honestly?”
“I guess I should have known something was up when they told me the price.”
“It’s fine,” Jane said, although, as far as Desmond could tell, she’d barely opened her eyes. “We’re only here for a few nights. As your executive producer, I approve.”
Chloe stepped out to the pavement of the parking lot and waved her clipboard in front of her face, indicating either the intensity of the heat or a bad odor. She was wearing black Capri pants and a skimpy white T-shirt and a pair of thick-soled, open-toed sandals that made her look especially tall and narrow. Her face was flushed a dark, pretty shade of copper, and her hair hung halfway down her back in long tendrils. In Boston, she’d stand out for being exceptionally attractive and perhaps only slightly underdressed, but walking across the parking lot of this unpromising motel in a remote finger of Florida that had been dubbed the “redneck Riviera,” she looked almost cartoonishly young and thin. And her confident stride in those thick sandals made her look more vulnerable than poised. She pulled open the glass door of the office and the white sunlight flashed in Desmond’s eyes. If he was seeing through Chloe’s well-made defenses to the weaknesses underneath, they were all in trouble. He looked up to the white sky and had a strong premonition that things were not going to go well here.
The air-conditioning unit was clattering like an antique fan, and his room was so cold you could store meat in it. The walls were paneled with dark wood. In the dim light cast by an eggplant-shaped lamp on the bureau, the walls looked slick, as if they were coated with many years’ worth of nicotine or were dripping with humidity. The place smelled of mildew and cigarettes. So much for the charm of undercapitalized businesses. Where was the Holiday Inn with its sanitized toilets and its spotless mediocrity when you needed it? Desmond sat on one of the double beds and started to take off his shoes, but looking at the shaggy orange carpeting, he thought better of it. Three nights. For three nights he could put up with anything. He pulled open the orange drapes, and the room was flooded with a burst of sunlight so bright it seemed to gobble up the room’s flaws. There was ocean, the soft, shifting green of the Gulf, rippling in the wind like a field of grass. When you had this outside your door, how could it matter what color the carpet was or how dirty the walls? The white sand, fine quartz blown down from the Appalachians, started at the foamy edge of the water and sprawled—through spiky grass and scrub pines—right up to the back wall of the motel. He pulled the drapes shut. The funny thing about dazzling sun and pretty views was that they made you want to share them with someone else. Better by far to have a dank room that made you want to run away.
He turned the TV on and off, checked out the bathroom, unpacked a suitcase, and made a call to Lorna, confirming their meeting with her tomorrow morning. He pulled down the orange bedspread and jammed four thin pillows under his head and, for the next hour, read through Jane’s lists. The business of biography had taught him that people were always the best sources of information about their own lives, providing you didn’t believe much of what they said about themselves. You had to look for the longing between the lines, look for the person they were trying hard to be, learn how to read the essential lies they told to themselves. If you took Jane’s lists at face value, you’d have to conclude that she was the hardest working wife and mother on the planet. But if you really wanted to know what occupied her mind, you’d have to decode the little check marks that showed up in the corner of certain pages of the appointment book. Poor Thomas, he thought, leafing through the numerous mentions of him scattered across the pages; he was the man Jane so eagerly wanted to love, which wasn’t necessarily the same thing as being the man she did love.
He took a short nap, and when he woke up, decided to try the beach. On the same shopping spree that had produced the gray Armani shirt, he’d bought a $58 bathing suit, a satiny, bile-colored thing chosen solely for the technologically advanced way it emphasized his crotch. He pulled it on, looked at himself in the tarnished mirror over the hotel bureau, and fell back onto the bed laughing. It was about as appropriate for this beach and his body as a pair of space boots. It made him look like a skinny, jaundiced middle-aged man with a saggy pouch in the crotch that was as erotic as a knobby knee. Age is a sneak, hiding little clues to its presence all over your body, wrinkles and bags and dark circles and creaky joints you’re unaware of until you trip over them just as you’re trying to make a good impression.
It was between seasons, too late for the summer crowds that drifted down from Georgia for the Gulf breezes and the fishing, too early for the German tourists who flocked here in the winter. The beach stretched for miles in either direction, empty except for a few children running along the edge of the green water, screeching and splashing. The water was cooler than he expected and he dove in quickly and swam straight out from shore until he was warm and panting. When he stopped and looked back, the shore seemed impossibly far away. Hotels were lined up along the beach like barricades protecting the rest of the town from the waves. He rolled over onto his back, letting the salty broth of the Gulf buoy him up, and gazed at the blank sky arching over him. Love was a little like swimming, he thought. You float along in effortless comfort, not really taking into consideration that at any moment you could be dragged down under the surface and drown.
Tomorrow when they went to visit Lorna, Jane and Chloe and Tim could photograph the house, take shots of the collected career clutter. He had his questions for Pauline Anderton’s daughter written down in a carefully composed list that narrowed in on those final years after her father had died and Pauline had gone into retreat. Why had she given it all up when she needed the money, finally had freedom, had club owners (albeit owners of minor clubs) hounding her to perform, and one legitimate record company ready to welcome her into their studio? Look how well he’d done, he thought as he paddled back to shore, in the privacy of his hollow room. If his relationship with Russell was the price he ended up having to pay for finishing this project, it just might be worth it after all.
As he was walking up the beach wrapped in a towel, he saw Jane sitting on the cramped cinder block patio behind the motel. She had on a blue, beachy bathrobe with big yellow flowers splashed on it, and her face was partly hidden by her sunglasses. She was holding a book in her hands, although she didn’t seem to be reading it. As he got closer, he saw that it was the copy of Playing with Childhood, Gloria’s harsh critique of parenting that he’d given her weeks earlier. He pulled a chair beside her and she peered at him over the top of her sunglasses. “Do you like my outfit?” she asked.
“Better than I like mine.”
“Opposite ends of the same impulse—trying to hide your flaws by showing them off or covering them up. Thomas gave me this,” she said, and fingered the lapels of the robe. “What’s your excuse?”
“Low self-esteem.” He tapped the cover of Gloria’s book. “What do you make of this?”
“It says everything I’ve ever thought about children and childhood.” She slid her sunglasses back up to her face and scratched at the back of her neck. It was late afternoon, and she couldn’t have been out here for more than twenty minutes, but already her skin, newly exposed by the hairdo, looked scorched. “But reading it in someone else’s words made it sound heartless. Poor Russell. If this book is any indication, he must have been raised in a laboratory.”
“Gloria likes to get on her soapbox and be outrageous enough to make people listen. I think Russell probably had a fairly normal upbringing.”
The corners of Jane’s mouth turned down, and for a moment, Desmond had a horrible feeling she might get weepy. Having met Gerald, he should have known better than to fling around the word “normal” so casually. Trying to recoup, he said, “What matters is that, eccentric or not, Gloria was a loving, devoted mother.”
“I’m sure she was. I’m not so sure I have been.”
“According to your lists,” he said, “you spend half your day doting on Gerald, driving him from one appointment to the next, taking him to museums, classes, lessons.”
She waved off the significance of this with both hands. “A hired hand could do that. I’m talking about inside. I never felt that hunger to be a mother, that gnawing hunger so many women talk about. I always assumed I’d have a child at some point, but it wasn’t with any urgency. If anything, it was with resignation, the way you assume you’ll probably have your wisdom teeth extracted at some point.” She looked off toward the water where two little girls were digging in the sand at the edge of the waves. The sun was beginning to set and the sky along the horizon had started to turn pale green and pink, like an unripe tomato with a faint blush of color. The wind had picked up some since he’d come out of the water, and Desmond could feel the fine white sand blowing against his ankles. He didn’t know how to respond to any of this; talk about parenthood had a vague, intangible quality to him, like listening to people talk about their vacations in places he had no particular interest in visiting.
“It’s not something you can talk about with anyone,” she went on. “I suspect Rosemary feels the same way about children, but I’d never talk about it with her. Nothing’s considered more hateful in a woman han not wanting to bear children. Even women who abandon or abuse their kids are regarded with less suspicion, since they at least had them in the first place and there’s always the chance they can be reformed.”
“You had Gerald,” he reminded her.
She shook her head slowly, back and forth, her tight new curls unmoving. “Almost from the day he was born, he was a completely independent person. I’d look down at him in his crib and he’d be staring at me with this indignant look in his eyes, as if he was saying: ‘What do you want?’ It must have been a response to something I was doing without even knowing it.”
“Everyone probably feels that way at some point.”
“They dont, that’s the odd part. I used to meet with a group of new mothers to talk about feeding and sleeping and trying to fit motherhood into our lives. After a month, I had to drop out. I couldn’t understand half of what they were saying, and it made me feel as if I wasn’t a real mother. Worst of all, that I wasn’t a real woman.” She paused. “I’m sure none of this makes sense to you.”
He had his own problems with feeling like an impostor. There were moments when he was dining or drinking or having a conversation with a heterosexual friend or colleague, even an abundantly tolerant person, and saw a look of benevolent curiosity cross his or her face, and felt, suddenly, as if he’d been cast off to some vast plain of ambiguity and otherness, where his features were shifting and his gender was indistinct. Then he’d be overcome by his own curiosity—perhaps a bit less benevolent—about himself and where he belonged among women and men in the big picture of life. More than once, he’d felt that way with Jane herself. But never, he realized as he gazed down the beach, never with Russell. He’d always felt solidly in place with Russell, unambiguously male, even when engaged in the least manly of activities.
“But when you’re with your husband,” he said. “Then you know who you are—a real mother, a real woman. No?”
“Oh, well,” she said, and set Gloria’s book down on the white plastic table beside her. “Dale could make anyone feel like a real woman.”
He was silent for a moment, hoping that the Gulf breeze would blow this little slip out to sea, but it must have blown it right back into her ears, for she turned her head away and took off her glasses. “Shit,” she said and reached into the pocket of her bathrobe for a pack of cigarettes.
The colors of the sky had darkened and spread along the horizon like a stain. A gust of warm wind blew and an empty soda can rattled across the edge of the patio. One of the little girls on the beach screamed and ran up to the road where her mother was sitting on a low seawall.
“That appointment book I gave you,” Jane said. “I’d love you to do me a favor and throw it out. I can’t decipher the code anymore and even if I could, half of it is lies, stuff I made up to impress someone else or kid myself.”
He reached out and took her hand. “Jane,” he said. “Why are you telling me all this?”
The wind shifted and the soda can rattled back across the patio. “I honestly don’t know,” she said.