Her Last Flight(85)

“Then don’t go,” Irene begged him. “Don’t get in the middle of somebody’s family fight. You know how it is in families. Everybody’s desperate for the high moral ground, and they’ll all fight dirty to get there. Try to get in the middle of that and you’ll end up dead.”

“And I thought you were an idealist.”

“And I thought you weren’t.”

“If I’m going to die in an airplane,” Sam said, “I don’t want to go down in the middle of some ocean, chasing an empty record.”

They were lying in bed. It was nearly midnight, and they had been arguing about this most of the day. Arguing and making love and arguing some more. The weather was turning chilly at night, so they fought curled around each other, sharing heat equally, skin on skin. Sandy slept on the bed with them, on a vacant pillow or else tucked into the bend of somebody’s knee. Sam was feeling much better; the bruises were already healing. Irene said it was because of the soups she made him, all the strong broth and wholesome food. Sam insisted it was the whiskey and the sex. He lay on his back, because that was more comfortable for his left leg in its plaster cast, and Irene lay on her side with her arm across his chest. Now she propped herself up and looked down at his face in the moonlight—the moon was waxing now, nearly full—and her heart ached because this was how he’d looked on the beach at Howland. So she did what she couldn’t do then, and straddled him. Sandy startled and leapt to the extreme end of the bed. Sam put his hands on her hips and grinned up at her, as if he hadn’t just spoken about getting shot down over Spain in his airplane.

“Promise me something,” she said.

“Name it.”

“Promise me you won’t die in an airplane.”

“I won’t die in an airplane.”

“Promise me.”

He drew her down for a long kiss. “Irene Foster. I swear to God I will die in your loving arms, and nowhere else.”



Later, Irene would look back on those nine days with Sam and marvel at how she could have been so joyful, when she knew this arrangement was short and temporary, when the future beyond it was like a night fog. How, when they ventured out to the beach after sunset, she could have danced in mad swirls on the sand while Sam played records on the phonograph; how they could have made love for hours under the glittering night sky with no regard whatsoever for the possible consequences of uniting yourself sexually with another human being. She could only say that she was drunk at last, for the first time in her life, and didn’t realize that when you were drunk—and it didn’t matter what you were drunk on, dope or alcohol or danger or passion—you lost all inhibition. You forgot your drunkenness would end eventually in some kind of misery or that consequences even existed at all.

What she couldn’t say was that they didn’t make the most of those nine days. They might have been nine years, Sam and Irene packed so much into them. They laughed and fought and ate and played and made love, and on the last night, after Sam hobbled up the cliff in his crutches, and Irene followed anxiously with the phonograph and the records, they fell into bed so exhausted, they did not make love at all, for once. They just slept in a tangle of skin and sweat, did not dream, did not stir until a premonition of dawn slid through the open window.

Irene opened her eyes and peeled her skin from Sam’s skin. She slipped out of bed and wriggled on her bathing costume and surfed for an hour. When she climbed back to the terrace, Sam had a cup of coffee ready for her, and this morning he wasn’t smiling.

“You’ve decided, then,” he said. “You’re going to Sacramento.”

She didn’t ask how he knew. She took the coffee and drank, and when her mug was empty she washed it out and showered in Sam’s bathtub, under its rickety shower pipe. He was waiting, towel in hand, when she came out. He dried her off himself, sort of hopping about on one crutch, which made her laugh. Once he had her laughing, he set her on the edge of the chair and made love to her a final time on his knees, cushioned by the rug: an ingenious solution to the problem of the cast, which had bedeviled them all week. When they had both finished, panting like racehorses, wrung stone dry, ruined for life, she hung herself on his wet shoulders and cried a little.



Sam hobbled out to the car with her. He said he wanted to make sure she left safely, which made her eyes roll. “Sam, this is nothing. Didn’t we land that ship on Howland Island by moonlight, with one engine?”

“It’s not the big things that kill you, Irene. It’s the little things.” He raised his hand and caressed Sandy, who nestled in Irene’s arms, rubbing beneath her ears as she liked. She stretched out her chin and purred graciously. “Sure going to miss this pussy of yours,” he said.

Irene started to laugh in great whoops, so that she had to lean back against the car to keep herself steady. Sam just shook his head and kissed her, and for an instant, the great sky blue above them, the bad thing had never happened, eight years never happened, and they were just Sam and Irene who shared a single joy, a single passion, and that was enough.

“Stay out of trouble, all right?” she said, knowing it was a stupid thing to say, because he was going to Spain, of all places, and she was going to fly solo around the world, and their separate paths were strewn with trouble.

Sam didn’t even bother to answer. He grasped the door handle and opened it for her. Irene stepped inside and sat in the driver’s seat, dumped Sandy carefully into the passenger seat, and Sam leaned in to kiss her again.