Inez said she knew the most wonderful man for the problem. “He may strike you at first as a phony,” she said, “but then, when you’re with him, you find yourself naturally screaming. It’s such a relief. And he teaches you how you can practice at home.” Milly said she was not much of a screamer — had never, in fact, screamed in her life. “High time you did, then,” Inez said. Our sportswriter said he had recently met a girl whose problem was stealing all the suede garments of house guests, and another, in her thirties, who cried all the time because she had not been accepted at Smith. We heard many more sirens in the streets. We all went home.
At 4 a.m., the phone rang about fifty times. I did not answer it. Aldo suggested that we remove it. I took three Valium. The whole night was sirens, then silence. The phone rang again. It is still ringing. The paper goes to press tomorrow. It is possible that I know who killed our landlord. So many things point in one direction. But too strong a case, I find, is often lost. It incurs doubts, suspicions. Perhaps I do not know. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I think it does, though. When I wonder what it is that we are doing — in this brownstone, on this block, with this paper — the truth is probably that we are fighting for our lives.
SPEEDBOAT
“YOU CALL that ninety degrees?” he said. It was one of the many unanswerable things he used to say. I hadn’t really called it ninety degrees. He had asked me to fly a ninety-degree turn. I had turned ninety-four. “Watch it. Watch it. Watch it,” he said. Silence. One knows instantly, or not at all, what Watch it is a warning of. More silence. Turns. Suddenly, he grasped my wrist. I jumped. “Christ!” he shouted. “I been telling you to relax.”
The students at our flight school are businessmen, veterans of Vietnam, two wives, three secretaries, a schoolboy, a Jesuit priest, and me. On clear days, the traffic over our small field is dense. Some of the veterans, who want to be professional pilots of all sorts, fly helicopters here. Planes are lined up in the sky to land, on the runway to take off. Bush pilots settle in the hills, and seaplanes on the pond. All around, helicopters keep leaping up and down. Now and then, one hears, from nowhere visible, a quavering voice. “Penrose,” it says by radio, “this is Six Two Uniform. Can you help me out. I’m lost.” The tower is calm. “Any familiar landmarks, Six Two Uniform?” Sorry. No. The tower asks for a description of any highways the lost pilot sees below; then, gradually, brings him in. I had not expected lost pilots to be a frequent problem in the air. I wondered, though, whether anyone, above the runway all alone, had ever feared and then refused to land. “Oh, sometimes they hesitate so long we think we’re going to have to shoot them down,” the instructor said. “But they run out of gas.”
The instructor is irritable, nearly always. He has taught pilots in World War II and the Korean War. He considers it part of his professional manner now to bark. A natural fighter pilot can solo after his first eight hours of instruction; after flying solo for another eight, he can just plain fly. All of us would be washouts as fighter pilots, certainly. The Jesuit, who, like the instructor, studies Chinese cooking in his spare time, tried to endear himself to the instructor with the present of a wok. The instructor was briefly pleased, but his bad temper, on the whole, is incorruptible. Not since the worst, dread days of school have I heard this electric alternation of instructions to Watch it, Watch out, Pay attention, Hurry, Listen, Keep your mind on what you’re doing, Hold it, Quit trying too hard, and, of course, Relax.
I fly solo these days, mostly in Three Nine Tango. I take off, turn left, turn left, turn left a third and fourth time, land, speed down the runway, take off, four lefts, land again, take off. That’s what we all do; it’s called touch-and-go. The reason, though, that I never practice any other thing is this: I land funny. Not roughly or dangerously, just a bit canted or askew. I am also really scared of crosswind gusts. “You don’t have to arrive,” the instructor said, bitterly, when I must have seemed to him to concentrate too gravely, on a windy day. “You’re just supposed to land.” Back in the early days, when we would practice stalls and spins, I nearly did give up. To stall, you deliberately climb too sharply, until you feel the engine cough. The plane shivers slightly. That’s a stall. It is time to push the nose down and the throttle fully up. This process violates every natural instinct. R. D. Laing aside, it seems to be the only way to level off. Since it seems so wrong to drop a plane’s nose and accelerate, when the horizon has already vanished underneath the wings and the whole machine is clearly under strain, I used to dive a bit too soon, to get it over with. “You. Didn’t. Feel. No. Stall,” the instructor would say, with enraged precision, as though he were about to leave and slam the door. Except that in a dive at a thousand feet, of course, he can’t. “That red light was on there,” I said, pointing to a small light, which was still blinking on the panel. “It says Stall.” A long silence. “Nobody. Told. You. To. Look. At. Any. Light,” he said.
It is no longer as clear as it was why I am in this flight school. Driving from the city to green places, it is acknowledged, takes too long. Flying is faster. Jim, who would be a less unlikely pilot than I am, says he hasn’t got enough certain free hours to take it up again. There is also in my mind the memory of a poem the Speech Arts coach recited, with great feeling and the purest diction, to our high school elocution class. “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth / And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings / And done a hundred things / You have not dreamed of. / Wheeled and soared and swung / Up, up the long, delirious burning blue,” and so on. “Put out my hand and touched,” the last line ended, “the face of God.” Well. It wasn’t Wallace Stevens. But at “touched,” each time, the Speech Arts coach’s voice broke. The poem had been written by a young Canadian pilot who fought in World War II. He crashed, unfortunately. Tino Bellardinelli, our All-State running back, was unmoved by this poem; he implacably chewed his toothpick. But another poem got to him. “There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood, / Touch of manner, hint of mood; / And my heart is like a rhyme, / With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time. / The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry / Of bugles going by. / And my lonely spirit thrills / To see the frosty asters, like a smoke upon the hills,” and so on. And Agnes Betty Cotts, who had gone through the first eleven years of her schooling in some twilight of sexuality and inattention, became lofty, intellectual, and fierce with this: “So live, that when thy summons comes to join / The innumerable caravan which moves / To that mysterious realm, where each shall take / His chamber in the silent halls of death, / Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, / Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed / By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave / Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch / About him,” etc. The Speech Arts coach worked with such diligence and faith on thirty juniors (who had before been known to mutter, derisively, “The Brain,” when anyone so much as spoke distinctly in their midst) that all of them subsequently went to college, each with an awful favorite poem in his heart. All of us, too, stared into a profound distance and, for years, dwelled upon this problem: “For if a man should dream of heaven and, waking, find in his hand a flower as a token that he had really been there, what then? What then?”