The Lioness(7)

“Billy?”

He looked over at Margie. She’d pulled her mask up to her forehead so she could look around the cabin.

“Good morning, sweetie,” he said, and kissed her. There was still, even now, a trace of Arpège on her skin.

“It’s not morning.”

“No, it’s not.”

“What time is it?”

“In what country?”

She smiled. “I’ll rephrase: how much longer ’til we land?”

“Forty-five minutes. Worst case.”

She nodded and pulled the blind back over her eyes, and instantly he regretted saying to her, worst case. That wasn’t the worst case. The worst case was that they crashed. Think Hammarskj?ld. He hated flying, everything about it, though mostly he hated the fact he was five miles in the air. It was why he hadn’t slept; it was why he couldn’t sleep. He listened to every sound the engines made and felt every lurch when they plowed through a cloud. He had to. He knew it was irrational, the precise sort of craziness that he heard from his patients, but he honestly believed that the plane would only stay aloft if he remained awake. If he slept, he’d never wake up. Or he’d only wake up when he heard the this-plane-is-going-down cries or for the millisecond immediately after the front of the tube slammed into the top of a mountain. Kilimanjaro, maybe, if they were off course. Apparently, the new government in Tanganyika and Zanzibar had just opened an airport near Kilimanjaro, but Pan Am wouldn’t use it. Thank God. A new airport with new air traffic controllers? Nope.

In all fairness, Tanganyika and Zanzibar seemed pretty damn stable. Or whatever the hell they had renamed the country last month. Tanzania. The Serengeti seemed perfectly safe—at least when it came to human predators. There must have been forty Americans and Europeans on this plane with Margie and him and the rest of Katie’s retinue who were going on photo or hunting safaris in or near there. The new nation had experienced nothing like the bloodshed and civil war that were occurring next door in the Congo. Of course, the most catastrophic of the violence this summer, that whole Simba rebellion, was in the eastern Congo, and that bordered Tanganyika and Zanzibar. That kidnapping? Those nuns? Jesus Christ. But the travel agents and the safari outfit were clear: they’d be nowhere near the border with Congo or the secessionist province. They’d fly into Kenya and head south into the Serengeti. It was done all the time: it took more than political unrest in the nation next door—okay, a shooting war between rival political factions—to slow the growth of Serengeti tourism.

No one knew that Billy was afraid of flying, though he supposed that Margie suspected it. His first wife had. But he always insisted that he was awake through every minute of every flight because of his sinuses or his ears, or because he liked to get work done on the flights.

“What sort of work?” Margie had asked the first time they were packing to fly cross-country from Los Angeles to New York to visit his parents. They were in the bedroom, their suitcases open on the bed.

“Oh, you know. Read professional magazines. University studies. Look over patient notes.”

He was pretty sure she hadn’t bought a word of it: it wasn’t like he read professional magazines or university studies all that often when they were on the ground.

He thought of his little boy at home in California. Marcus—who had grown into Marc, unless he or his ex-wife really needed to get the boy’s attention or make a point, in which case that second syllable was everything—was four. He thought, too, of his ex-wife. On the other side of the world, right about now the two of them were probably walking home from the park with the swing sets and the massive slide a couple of blocks from their house. The house Billy himself had once lived in. The house with the little pool of its own. His new bungalow, the one he lived in with Margie, hadn’t a pool, but he was only about a ten-minute drive to his sister Katie’s, and she wouldn’t have cared if he bought a water chaise and a case of beer and lived in her pool. Hers was a Hollywood classic: shaped like a kidney with a diving board at one end, where the water was five meters deep. God, his kid sister had a pool that was almost as big as the first floor of the bungalow where he lived now. She had as many bedrooms in her place as he had rooms in his.

He wondered if there was a word for sibling gigolo-hood. Sycophant? Minion? Hanger-on? Well, all eight of the guests on this safari, including Katie’s husband, were, in a way, the movie star’s hangers-on. None of them would be on this plane or this trip if it weren’t for Katie. What was it that their mother had said to him at Katie’s and David’s wedding? Glenda Stepanov was at that stage where people who knew her would know she was drunk, but everyone else would assume she was just being Katie Barstow’s eccentric, acerbic mom. You knocked up Margie pretty damn quick. Who’s going to pay for my new grandchild’s college someday? Me or your sister? It was not an unreasonable question, given his alimony and child support, and the fact that already he had availed upon his mother for a little help with the down payment on the bungalow. Already he was stretched thin, no doubt about it, and a new baby was certainly going to exacerbate that. It was his mother’s language and his mother’s tone that was so hurtful. So typically hurtful.

Among the smaller disfigurements to his psyche, but one he contemplated often as a therapist himself, was that Halloween when he was eight and Katie was three. The Haunting of Emily Dickinson had just opened at the Beck, and there was a performance on the thirty-first: Halloween night. The show was an odd one for his father, Roman Stepanov, to produce: a ghost story that they all pretended had a literary pedigree. (It didn’t. No one really thought the poet was beleaguered by ghosts: not then, not now.) And the reviews had been, even when viewed charitably, mixed. Hence a redoubled effort with the social and gossip press. There was going to be a media reception before the performance and an appropriately themed cast party after the Halloween show, with yet more reporters and columnists invited. Their parents would be at the theater for both functions, and so the plan had been for the two children to go trick-or-treating throughout the apartment building with his friend David Hill and David’s mom. In theory, it shouldn’t have been a big deal. And yet it was. Or it became one. Glenda Stepanov decided on the thirtieth, the day before Halloween, that she herself should take Billy and Katie trick-or-treating that very moment. She made this decision after nine that night, when Roman was out and she was drunk. She had to wake Katie from a sound sleep. Billy recalled that he was in bed, too, though he hadn’t dozed off yet. Roman was having costumes made for the kids by one of his show’s costume designers: Katie was going to be a kitten and Billy was going to be a pirate. But the outfits weren’t quite finished and were still at the Beck. And so when his mother pulled him, a little dazed, from the bed, she dressed him in his costume from the year before: cowboy chaps that now were too short, a flannel shirt so tight he barely could button it, and a cowboy hat, all of which stunk of mothballs. She put Katie into the same cotton-and-wool-stuffed pumpkin she had worn when she was two, and it still reeked of the diaper she had worn underneath it the year before. Katie was howling because she had been dragged from a deep sleep, and he was crying because it was the wrong night and he wanted to trick-or-treat with David, but Glenda was brooking no dissent. They were going that moment, even though it was nine thirty at night and it was the day before Halloween.