Her Last Flight(48)
THAT’S IT. His voice was firm, not worried at all. KEEP YOUR SPEED UP.
Irene’s heart chattered away but her mind cleared. Her vision made a tunnel of the path before them. It was like the roller coaster when she was eleven, the whole world narrowing to a single corridor, to the patch at the end where you landed.
The airplane fell softly. The silver ground rose and grew before her. There was no wind to rattle her, nothing to think about but the descent of the Centauri to earth. The island was flat and covered with sand and grass, as near to a landing strip as you could ask for on an uninhabited island in the middle of the ocean. YOU’VE GOT IT, Sam shouted in her ear. His hand lifted from hers. He stepped back and buckled himself into the navigator’s seat. It was like any other landing, like that time Sam shut one engine off and made her land in the Mojave Desert. The earth came up to meet them. The still, dark grass and the brush and BANG! The wheels slammed into the ground, bumped and slammed again, tore through bushes, sand and leaves flying up around the windows, spinning and bumping and coming at last to rest in the long, quiet night, an hour before dawn.
Hanalei, Hawai’i
October 1947
Because Olle’s away in Honolulu, trying to keep his brother-in-law Kaiko from climbing out of his hospital bed, Lindquist has to cover his flights for him. She doesn’t fly the airplanes often, she explains to me, as we drive to the airfield—first because of the risk of some cosmopolitan tourist recognizing her and second because most people would rather eat rabbit droppings than take off in an airplane piloted by a woman.
“So you see,” she says, “it was all for nothing, everything I did. All those flights, all those speeches and books, the endless publicity. George used to say that we had entered the age of woman, that people were fascinated by women breaking free to do adventurous things, but look around you.”
“I’d say it’s a hell of a lot easier for a woman to do what she wants today than fifty years ago.”
“But she has to work twice as hard and be ten times as good at what she does.”
“It’s better than not being allowed to try.”
“And when she fails,” Lindquist continues, pulling into the long drive from the road, “God help her.”
We bring the cat along in the back seat, because Lindquist doesn’t like to leave it alone all day, at that age. What age? I ask, and she answers, after a moment’s thought, Nineteen.
Well, color me impressed. I didn’t even know cats could live that long. Lindquist says that’s because Sandy’s a survivor. Mallory found her on the beach one day, the day Lindquist met him, as a matter of fact. She stowed away on the flight to Australia.
“No kidding?” I look to the feline with renewed admiration. “You mean she survived the crash and everything? The weeks stranded on the island?”
“Lucky for her, the place was lousy with rats. They used to mine those islands for guano, back in the previous century, and naturally all the guano ships were overrun with rats. She must’ve gained five pounds.”
We’ve reached the airfield cafeteria, where I’m to wait while she takes a planeload of tourists and locals back to Oahu. I observe how she’s in competition with her own stepson, and she says not really. Some people like to fly, some people like to sail.
“Count me among the second clan,” I tell her, as I settle myself at the lunch counter with a cup of coffee.
“You’ll be all right? I should be back in a couple of hours.”
“I’ll be just fine.”
She looks to the cat before she leaves. “Keep an eye on her for me, will you? Don’t let her get into any trouble.”
Though I tried and tried that autumn of 1944, I could not get Velázquez to tell me anything more about Sam Mallory. He said he had promised Mallory never to reveal what he had done in Spain, and he—Velázquez—had already broken that vow for my sake, which was unconscionable and must not be repeated. You have a way of disarming me, he said to me, but now I am on my guard.
As September passed into October, however, I went on meeting Velázquez. I told myself this was because I still had some hope of disarming him again, and because the strain of war on one’s nerves required some carnal release, which nobody understood better than Velázquez. Sometimes he would join me at the Scribe in Paris, when he could get a few hours’ leave from his duties at the airfield, which were largely administrative; sometimes I would travel out to Orly and meet him there. In the beginning, the terms of our association were clear and simple. Since we had the good fortune to share an electric physical attraction and libidos of roughly equal strength, we should screw each other silly, as often as we could arrange to meet.
But as the weeks went on, we began to spend time together that was not entirely devoted to sex. We would go on walks or drive a Jeep into some village and look at the local cathedral, if it still stood; after making love, instead of getting dressed or falling asleep, we would have these conversations about art and politics and ethics. I was surprised to find that despite his cynicism Velázquez was an idealist, a believer in fate but also a devout Catholic, even though the Republicans in Spain had hated the church; he did not understand how I, a nonbeliever, could adhere to any moral code at all, and he was deeply worried for my immortal soul. Velázquez spoke in precise, beautiful language, and our discussions had this transparent quality, this clarity of expression, so that you could perceive each thought in the same way you could observe an object with your eyes. I remember I would watch his mouth as he spoke, or the bridge of his nose, or the wisp of smoke from his cigarette. He used to trail his other hand along my skin, to draw some diagram with his fingers to illustrate a point. Often he would turn on his side to fix me with a serious expression and ask me some question that stopped me in my tracks, that required me to walk back all the way along some path of logic and start again, in a new direction I hadn’t imagined, while he listened intently. Then we would make love again, and the texture of him was somehow different, and the texture of me.