Читать книгу Weather to Fly - Christopher LeGras - Страница 11

A Jumbo Jet’s Soul

When lightning blasted her nest she built it again on the same tree, in the

splinters of the thunderbolt.

—Robinson Jeffers, The Beaks of Eagles

From the old pool chair in the backyard grass Daisy watches a jumbo jet lumber across the Los Angeles sky. It’s early autumn and the air is impossibly blue, she thinks, then giggles when she hears Dorothea scold, You can do better than that tired old cliché.

As always she’d be right. Dorothea was Daisy’s English teacher in her senior year at John Adams High School in Bakersfield. She was the one who convinced Daisy at the tender age of seventeen that she was destined to be a great literary writer. She was also Daisy’s first true love.

After high school Daisy went to UC Davis, where it happened Dorothea was getting an MFA in creative writing. A few weeks into Daisy’s sophomore year her favorite band played a concert down at the Sacramento Valley Amphitheater. The Jane’s Addiction Show was the first of many road trips Daisy took with her roommate Eliza and two other girlfriends, and that night was also the first time any of them tried hallucinogens. As Daisy’s mushroom trip peaked in an explosion of colors and Roman candles above the stage where the band was belting out the psychedelic “Three Days,” she twirled straight into Dorothea’s—at that moment they were still Ms. Creasy’s—arms. Something other than the shrooms, something cosmic and beautifully inexplicable fueled by music and autumn sunset, inspired her to kiss her former teacher full on the lips. Ms. Creasy reciprocated tentatively at first before cupping Daisy’s cheeks and kissing her more passionately than anyone ever had, boy or girl. By the end of the song Ms. Creasy was Dorothea. By the end of the concert Dorothea was Tia.

Tia kept Daisy sane through the mind-numbing modern college experience, and as much out of desperation to be finished and get on with life as aptitude for her studies Daisy graduated in three years. They moved to Los Angeles and rented a three-bedroom ranch-style house in Mar Vista, an up-and-coming section of the westside that, before yuppies started moving, in was called that sketchy area between Venice and Culver City. They rescued a Jack Russell Terrier mix and named him Davey, after the Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. Tia helped Daisy swap Craptastic Sam, the fifteen-year-old Honda Civic her parents bought her in high school, for a slightly used Subaru Outback. The three of them went camping nearly every weekend in the spring and summer. The eastern Sierras, Owens Valley, Sana Ynez, even as far north as the Trinity Alps. Daisy had never seen so much of her home state before Tia. For two years she was as happy as she had been in her life. They proposed to each other an even dozen times, each time getting a little more serious about it.

Then Daisy’s writing career took off and Tia’s didn’t. Daisy got a job with LA Weekly and Tia drifted. Daisy’s fiction was published in literary journals and she started working on her first novel. Tia worked part-time at the local indie bookstore and started drinking. Daisy started doing yoga and became a vegan. Tia stopped exercising altogether and became an alcoholic. By their fourth year together Daisy’s best friend, teacher, and lover was slipping away from her. Daisy didn’t know whether the alcohol was changing Tia or if the woman she loved was a different person than she’d thought. They spent the last two years of their life together in a sort of living purgatory in which Daisy’s happiness was inversely proportionate to the amount of booze Tia had consumed on any given day. When it came, the agonizing decision was a relief.

Their last night together they made love, agreeing without saying that maybe just maybe it would produce one last spark of the old magic. In the beginning they’d been able to turn each other on with a sideways glance across a crowded room. They’d read each other’s minds and bodies to a degree that was downright uncanny, like the night at Manny’s party in WeHo when they made eye contact in the living room and ninety seconds later were in the car, windows down, on their way to Dan Tana’s for martinis and steak. Once they were out of earshot of anyone lingering in Manny’s manicured front yard they shouted simultaneously, Dan Tana’s steaks, nightcap at Formosa, home to fuck! They laughed halfway to the restaurant and Daisy never felt more in love. The last night, as she slid her hands along the familiar curve of Tia’s hips she’d thought, if not the magic, at least a soft-sweet last memory. An hour later Tia smashed their coffee pot on the floor, snatched her bottle of Stoli from the freezer (spilling three bags of Whole Foods frozen peas on the kitchen floor, the remnants of which Daisy was still discovering months later and breaking down every time) and peeled out of the driveway of the place that suddenly wasn’t home anymore. Five hours later, at two in the morning, two cops knocked on the door. They told Daisy that Tia had downed the bottle and gone off the road on Mulholland Drive a half mile south of Coldwater, which was about the worst stretch of the worst road she could have picked for that particular wrong turn. Her green Honda CR-V plunged 150 feet into a ravine and all the airbags in Detroit wouldn’t have saved Dorothea Creasy. Daisy didn’t attend the funeral in Tia’s hometown of Braintree, Massachusetts because Tia had never told her family she was a lesbian.

Now Daisy watches the plane, studies it. She drags on a Marlboro and thinks it’s one of those new superjumbos. An Airbus, maybe, or Lockheed. Lockheed still makes jumbo jets, right? As it sweeps with a white noise whisper across the LA basin she sees it’s one of the double-deck jobs and she knows it’s an Airbus because it was all over the news when the first one touched down at LAX last year. Biggest passenger jet in the world, she seems to recall reading it can carry 700 people. The jet seems aware of its size, something in its angle of attack suggesting to Daisy that it knows of the absurdity of something as big as itself carrying so many people through the sky at nearly the speed of sound. It’s almost apologetic, she thinks, and why not? It is absurd, but not because it seems to defy logic and maybe even physics but because of its very necessity. In one hundred years humanity has gone from the last horses and buggies and first coughing Model T’s to whisking itself around by the hundreds at 35,000 feet and 600 miles per hour. That’s the absurdity the plane wears as visibly as its Air Emirates livery, she’s certain of it.

Then she thinks, You’re certain of that sort of idea because it’s your own. You’ll never tell anyone about it and so it will never be challenged or worse, laughed at. Though there was a time not so long ago you’d have told Tia, and a time not long before that when she’d have kissed you and said, Write that down, baby, before you forget it. It’s beautiful. Oh yes, you’d have told that haunted face. You’d have told her everything. And you did, didn’t you?

Like the fact that you’d fucked Manny. It seemed like a good idea to come clean. You thought you owed her at least that, in spite of everything. And you felt so righteous. Deep down you also thought she’d forgive you. No, you expected her to forgive you. She’d inflicted so much pain on you and you’d forgiven her so many times, and finally you gave as good as you got. Well, you’ve seen how that worked out, Daisy girl. An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind, as they say.

Do you remember lying in her arms, both of you knowing it was the last time and this time probably forever, if not then certainly for a good long time? Of course you do. You remember how you just wanted to make those final few moments last, stretch them out and taste them like carnival taffy. So why did you do it? Was it because you thought if she forgave you, you guys would somehow be even? No, it was because you wanted to finish the thing. You wanted to be certain, this time. After four years of uncertainty and two years of hell, you were exhausted. Besides, you figured Manny’s queer too so it didn’t really count.

Daze, you old rationalizer, you.

Actually, Daisy thinks as the plane begins its gentle bank toward LAX, maybe the only things any of us is ever certain about are the things we don’t tell anyone. Like how I’ll never share my belief that a 750,000 pound jumbo jet has a soul. Or like how I didn’t tell Tia why I slept with Manny. If I’d told her she would have protested, I can hear her, Oh, Daze, can’t you see why you did it? And I would have seen and then there would have been no certainty about anything.