He recognized her unhappiness as he would an aging relative, all its expressions familiar, and tried to keep his impatience with it a secret. As his wife was, and his mother though she’d never say it, Fay was hurt by the few words he used to sum up his life, certain experiences she might have assumed had carved something away, fashioned him inalterably. What did they imagine? It was no one edict booming from a uniformed chest, no one edifying fluke, a carrier landing on little fuel, the rear hook of his plane barely snapping into the taut steel and preventing his roll into ocean. Even if he wanted to, he could not tell the story of his life.
It was the sum of these hours, eating at other ways he might have gone. It was the model glue, fibrous and salty if you tasted it, left behind on his mother’s stiff embroidered doilies, on fat mugs and tall glasses, on the knobs on the radio and the rubber horn on his bike, in five points on the mesh screen door that led to the backyard. It was the models of planes, flawless, assemblies that took full weeks, which he hung from his ceiling. He watched them as he tried to sleep, how they twirled when a wind came across the flat town of small houses. It was the year he stopped buying them, twelve, so that he could save his dull pennies for flying lessons, and how it starved him to walk past the storefront downtown, the boxes stacked in a tantalizing stagger, inside them the concise instructions, a world explained. It was the job he worked to pay for the lessons, the trembling of his alarm before it was light out, the necessary extension of the wrist as he hurled the bundles, the newsprint now the thing on his fingers, impossible to truly excoriate. Even the bathroom soap bar turned ashy, and at dinner his father cursed this. Your own money, your own damned soap.
It was the veterans who gave him the lessons, men whose sleep never fully left their faces, looking out the thick glass, muttering clipped directions. It was all purchases thought of in terms of the instruction they cut into—an egg cream one-seventh the cost of an hour in the sky, a Jules Verne paperback one-fifth—and almost nothing worth it. He was fourteen, then fifteen, and he lived like a monk, an early bedtime so he’d be rested for his dawn lesson. He had only the most glancing interest in food. Television did nothing for him. He was unmoved by the pinups his peers kept in their lockers.
It was his first solo, announced to him only by the unbuckling of the other man’s belt, a clap on the shoulder, all the air in the cockpit suddenly just his to breathe. No chance to call home first. Pilot’s license, age sixteen. A drunk friend of his father’s spread out in the living room, feet high on an ottoman, swiping at his wet eyes and howling: But he can’t drive my Ford five blocks to the drugstore? He had little interest in the automobile, where it could go and how it got there. He wanted the blue that was spotless and matchless.
It was the package from the Navy, propped up on his mother’s dining table when he came home from school: four years of university, paid, cut in half by three years of service. It was the chalky air he breathed in the low-ceilinged college classrooms where the courses in engineering began at seven, right where they’d left off, so he learned to arrive with the coffee already angry in his system. Tight capitals in graphite, headings and subheadings, scatter diagrams he made to pop with colored pencils, one red and one blue. The other classes he attended like some errant father, squinting to grasp their return on his future, turning away from the heart of the conversation. Friends were a hobby other people had. It was each day closer to the time he would be flying again.
And then he was in training in Pensacola, in the company of other boys who were also always looking up to identify planes, spitting out makes and models, good news and bad. The air in Florida was alarming, thick to an extent that breathing felt like a choice you might forget to make. Add the suit, an inner inch of fluff like what kids wore to careen down snowy hills, the outer shell like tractor tire.
It was his first solo in the Navy, six hundred horsepower, and the difference was an occasion. He wrote in ink in his journal: like the difference between an out-of-tune fiddle and an orchestra pit. When he flew, so far from his Ohio boyhood, he was no longer aware of where his house was, the roof under which his mother was making meals go further with the liberal use of bread crumbs, or his younger sister’s school, where she might be stationed on the blacktop, peering up, hoping to signal to him, moving her arms in elaborate formations, the meaning of them known only in her little-girl mind.
Alone in the SNJ for the first time, his first monoplane, he heard the gruff strictures of his superiors. He’d made their voices a part of his thinking. Kahn, if you treat a change of altitude like an emergency, then it will become an emergency. When he landed, parking the thing without so much as a bump, disrobing did little to cool him. His whole body was a source of heat, pride bigger for knowing fear. In the cafeteria later, giggling like the children they’d recently been, all the other pilots in his class came at once, drooling to perform this act of tradition. He didn’t protest, didn’t say the tie had been a gift from his Scout leader, a man who had taught him to read stars and carve a tent from snow. He just grinned as the blades of the scissors came in, coruscating, and felt the lightness, the small shift in his weight, as they waved the bottom half of his tie around like just-killed dinner. In his bunk at night in the lined composition notebook he taped it in with two strips he’d borrowed from the office. FIRST SOLO USNAF, WITH APOLOGIES TO ERNIE, it said.
How could he have written that for anyone else? And Korea? He couldn’t have told Elise, who needed the radio on the whole time she slept, what it was to suddenly get your funeral suit cleaned ahead of time, to make a practice of imagining your bunk the one made in the morning and never returned to. That it actually came recommended, from the few older men who would speak about it—that you envision yourself ejecting too late, a soaring, newly soulless thing on fire, practice thinking out the morbid possibilities while on god’s earth so that when the choice came, when the awful moment knocked high over a country not your own, it was not these images you saw but your training that you felt.
If he had told Fay that he once flew over a squadron of Korean officers exercising, that any of his colleagues would have shot or bombed, that he watched the perfect synchronicity of their jumping jacks and couldn’t—if he had revealed this to her, would it have explained anything?
He took from her only what she gave so freely, he told himself, along with certain lies about her youth. She was fourteen years his junior. Experiences only passed over women that young, he thought. Whatever went on between them was something she could afford. He’d be a blip in time, something as small as a dress she’d once worn and only vaguely remembered. A color, a shape. He wasn’t in the way of anything, he thought. All her life was open.