Her Last Flight(18)
In England, before the Allied invasion, I was living in staff huts right near an air base, and just about every other day some poor chap would ram his ship into the earth nearby. The others in the press pool would dutifully trudge out to take notes and pictures, to point and stare and shake their heads at the gore, but I never would. I never went to see a crackup if I could help it, although there were plenty of times I couldn’t help it, and I faced the wreckage as bravely as I could. Also, I had a rule not to sleep with any pilots. You might get attached, after all, and then they would inevitably get killed, and you were left to imagine those last seconds over and over, the certain expectation of death, your helplessness in the face of it, your beloved body strapped into a hunk of metal that plummeted toward the earth, nothing you could do but wait for annihilation. I can’t think of a thing in the world more terrifying than that.
And now this terror has followed me here, to a peaceful corner of a remote island in the middle of the Pacific. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? Still I follow Olle and the two pilots out of the cafeteria and into the soft Hawaiian morning. The three of them bolt toward the smoking pile of metal and drag out the body like any old piece of meat. Olle seems to know what he’s doing. He arranges limbs and listens for breath and barks some order at one of the pilots. In the distance, someone’s dragging out a water tank on some kind of caisson.
And I say to myself, God forgive me.
I’m going to tell you a story now, a story I’ve never told anybody. It does me little credit, but I was young and foolish, as the saying goes, and haven’t we all got some old folly that tortures us?
The summer between my first and second years of college, when I had just turned eighteen years old, I worked as a secretary at a law firm in order to save money for the next year’s tuition, and there was this lawyer there who ran the place. He was handsome and authoritative, a brilliant jurist, and he was also forty-seven years old and married. He acted awfully stern with me, never stopping to banter and charm as he did with the other secretaries, as if he actively disliked me, but the sterner he was the more he occupied my thoughts. At work my fingers struck like lightning on the typewriter while my eyes wandered around the office, following him wherever he went, craving some crumb of approval, wondering what on earth I’d done to earn his displeasure.
One Friday afternoon in early July, he had made all these notes on a brief and needed them typed up, and the other two secretaries—Patty and Laura—had already gone home. He said, I guess we shall have to wait for Monday then, and I said, Oh, I’d be happy to stay and type it for you. He said it was too much trouble, and I said it was no trouble at all. An hour later I was flat on my back on the Chesterfield sofa in his private office, blouse unbuttoned, virginal navy skirt up around my hips, married lawyer rocking away on top of me, and let me tell you it hurt like the dickens in more ways than one, but I didn’t stop him. I couldn’t, even if I’d had the physical strength for it. I was miserable and ashamed, and at the same time I felt this surge of anguished joy when he shuddered and shook and shouted, begged God and his wife to forgive him, collapsed on my chest and called himself a lost man, because I thought that must mean I had won not just his approval, but his adoration. I was loved! Then he lifted himself off and said what a whore I was, I should have stopped him. He said this even as he wiped my blood from his skin with his handkerchief. He swore me to silence, swore this could never happen again.
That night when I went home, I couldn’t even look at my mother or my stepfather. I felt this stain on me. I was so ashamed I wanted to die. In the middle of the night I went to the medicine cabinet and stared at the aspirin and wondered how much it would take to kill me, and if I hadn’t been scared of my mother finding me first, I might have done it.
On Monday it happened again. He told me to bring him his morning coffee, and when I stepped into his office with the cup he closed the door and kissed me. The coffee spilled. He told me he had spent all weekend in torment, thinking about nothing but me and what we had done, drunk with love for me, how I had bewitched and seduced him, this was all my doing, all my fault. He kissed me again, and I kissed him back, because I thought I should feed this thing, this love he said he had for me, this power I thought I had over him. He unbuttoned my blouse and kissed my neck, my breasts, then turned me around and laid me over the top of his desk, so that the leather blotter pressed against my cheek. When he was finished he gave me a handkerchief and told me this was our secret, that if I said a word about this to my mother, to anybody, he would cut all ties with me and I would be disgraced as a whore in front of everybody. So I didn’t say a word. I hated what we did, hated myself for doing it, hated these physical stirrings that sometimes came with what we did, and yet I never refused him, God forgive me, never once said no to him, because despite all the shame and the revulsion I craved his love, or rather I wanted him not to stop loving me, because I thought his lust for me was a symptom of love, and if I stopped feeding that lust he would no longer love me. Nobody would love me!
Long story short, we carried on through July and August, and though I still sometimes went to the medicine cabinet in the middle of the night to stare at the aspirin bottle, I never worked up the nerve to swallow the pills. I figured if I killed myself, people might find out why, and his wife’s heart would be broken and his life ruined, and all of this would be my fault.
At last I returned to college for the autumn term. By late September I realized I was going to have a baby. Well, of course I was! We must have fucked fifty times at least; I doubt there was a moment all that summer when my fresh young womb was not teeming with that man’s sperm. I wrote a letter to my lover and asked humbly what I should do, but he never replied. I thought it would be bad form to confront him face-to-face, so I went to Mother, who promptly took me to some doctor she knew of, who solved the problem. After the thing was done, she told me she hoped I’d learned my lesson, because she and my stepfather wanted no more to do with me, and that was when I started on the road with my camera, older but wiser, armed with a few new guiding principles.