Fly Me Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Riley

  Author photograph by Fred Woodward

  Cover design by Lucy Kim

  Cover photograph © Flip Warulik/Alamy

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  Excerpt from “Notes from a Native Daughter” by Joan Didion. Copyright © 1968, renewed 1996 by Joan Didion. Published in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Reprinted by permission of the author. • Excerpt from “The Double Standard of Aging” by Susan Sontag. Copyright © 1972 by Susan Sontag, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. • Excerpt from “Castling” by Renata Adler. Published in Speedboat. Copyright © 1976 by Renata Adler. Used by permission of the author. • Excerpt from The Hunters by James Salter. Copyright © 1956 by James Salter. Used by permission. All rights reserved. • Excerpt from Gravity’s Rainbow (Penguin Books) copyright © 1973 by Thomas Pynchon. Reprinted with permission by Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-316-36214-6

  E3-20170428_NFDA

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: Fourth of July Nineteen Seventy-Two

  Part II: The Glen

  Part III: Fly Me; or, The Momentum of Last Resort

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Newsletter

  To Patti, Penny, Peggy, June, Ethel, LeValley, and all the other founding mothers of Sela del Mar

  “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

  —Joan Didion, “Notes from a

  Native Daughter”

  Part I

  Fourth of July

  Nineteen Seventy-Two

  See it like Suzy sees it. The wide white beach, the blue carpet rolling out to the edge, the red bodies cinched around the courts at Nineteenth Street. The peninsula to the north and the peninsula to the south, bookends on the bay. Just imagine how that view might register in the body of someone still getting used to living at the ocean. How it might bleach her judgment, boost her nerve, and lead her to places she never meant to go. This is what it looks like from the top of Nineteenth, where the blacktop green-flags its tumble to the water. As she steers her eyes over the edge, her body follows.

  Suzy carving. Suzy rolling the board with the arches of her feet, all heels to all toes, way out wide and again across the middle. Suzy skimming the yellow centerline and snapping back at the curb, hard rubber and asphalt pinging like a typewriter. Suzy upright but curved, like parentheses, shifting open and closed, tracing even switchbacks, leveling the grade.

  Suzy’s got a cotton dress over an American-flag bikini, striped bottoms knotted at her hip. Her light-red hair blows back behind her like a vinyl banner tailing a single-engine Cessna. Suzy keeps her eyes on the asphalt but senses the beach growing closer, the music sharpening from bass to melody. It’s already packed, clusters buzzing over the radio. She should know some of them, these boys from here, those girls from nowhere. She should recognize the ones from work (six or seven of the stews she flies with live in town), and from Howlers (she chatted with some staff at a show last weekend), plus Grace and Mike. It’s Tuesday, Independence Day, and according to the note Grace left her this morning, Grace has “all sorts bitchin’ shit in store for the 4.”

  Suzy pulls up halfway down the hill to straighten her sandal. It is morning still, just before noon. It is cool and gray, but bright—soft and expansive, like when a high-watt bulb sieves through a lampshade. Suzy feels a sudden heat in her hair. There is an elevation all around. The houses lining the street, single story and quietly proportioned, show themselves to be painted not shades of charcoal but full-spectrum colors. The palms and elms and bougainvillea that edge the small yards plug in like strings of lights. White pickets, wet surfboards, neoprene bodysuits salted and drying on the property fences. Suzy lifts her sight line over the rooftops toward the sweep of the horizon and pushes her butterfly frames up the bridge of her nose. The water glints like a scattered handful of ground-up glass.

  The bottom half of the hill flattens out, and Suzy picks a straight line toward the sand. She aims the nose of her board toward the courts at Nineteenth and pulls herself tall like a bowstring. There’s a busy avenue to cross at the bottom, and she barrels through with a quick prayer to the intersection. As she steps into the sand, the clouds break.

  To Suzy Whitman, that promise of gray to blue—the burning off of the clouds, on cue each day near noon—has become proof that Sela del Mar was the right place to land after all. The certain spot for her just now. It’s happened each day since she arrived: thirty mornings of June Gloom, reliably shed into summer. It was the first thing Grace mentioned when Grace and Mike moved to Sela. Not the palms. Not the beach tar. Not Taco Tuesdays at Howlers. But that weird weather thing, how it just seemed to vibe with what all these people were about.

  Suzy slides her flip-flops off and sinks her feet into the sand, tucks her board under arm, turns her face up into the naked light. She wades farther out onto the beach, watches a volleyball game to her right. Though she expected to be among plenty of strangers, she’s surprised she doesn’t recognize anyone at all. Just bodies thrown wide, lunging for passing shots. Or hinged open in beach chairs, stretched out but propped up, like square root signs flipped over. All but one or two sets of skin are darker than hers. Even after a month in the sun, she hasn’t had much success jackhammering through the calcified layers of her upstate winters. She’s just never cared this acutely before, never given it regular thought. But around her now: the toasted girls alight with their gumminess, the boys with their counterhandsome peeling noses and white eyelashes. Their rhythmless rubber flailing to the Hollies. What is missing for them, Suzy has come to realize, is a plain self-consciousness. Their confidence, their satisfaction—complete and uncomplicated. That, and they’re wasted already. Suzy keeps her dress on and looks for something to drink.

  She slips between adjacent volleyball courts. The tournament has already been running for three hours. She’d been told all about it by Grace and Mike. The Drunk ’n’ Draw. Mixed pairs, two on two, a case of Coors for each team to split. She doesn’t know the pair receiving
serve to her left but recognizes the other couple from Howlers. The boy’s body is long and wide at the top—surfer’s torso, swimmer’s shoulders—and it’s the color of the grilled hot dogs on the Weber. He serves from the back line and drifts into position to receive an on-two dink around midcourt. The pass to his partner at the net draws her into a setter’s squat, and her hands move into a steeple above her head. The ball trampolines off her fingers, high and still like a soap bubble, and he leaps to meet it with the base of his palm. But the timing’s all wrong. He’s way up out of the sand before the ball hits its crest, and he slaps it open-handed and side-armed, on a direct course for Suzy’s face. Without processing it, she gets both arms up and blocks the ball right back into the court. It’s more effective than if she’d had time to think it over. The point evidently ends the game, and both teams look relieved to settle back in with their cases.

  The guy passes Suzy and smiles. He tries to say something, but it comes out as sound and saliva. Suzy waves him off and says, “No, no, I’m sorry.” She finds a keg buried at the weathered post at the edge of the court. The post has names and dates carved into it. Hearts and initials. Phone numbers. A couple RIPs. The oldest date she sees is 1/1/61. New Year’s on the beach.

  Suzy finds a seat far enough from the court to avoid stray shots, but near enough to keep an eye out for Grace and Mike. She plants her board into the sand like a spade, crosses her ankles, and compresses into a tidy knot. She drinks half her beer and scans the horizon. It is hotter all at once, and she feels as though her head is floating perceptibly above her hairline.

  A jet rises over the water. It’s well off the runway and tracking, at fifteen degrees of ascent, above the white verticals of Santa Monica and then the big upper arm of Malibu. Suzy squints: United. Fifty-five seconds later: Western. Another fifty-five: Pan Am. IDing the paint job isn’t a challenge—guessing where it’s headed is the game. The United jet spirals deliberately before aiming itself back east toward the continent. United hubs: Chicago, Washington, Newark. She watches the plane swirl higher and perceives it to be pointing more northerly than not. O’Hare in four hours. Three flights a day, spread across the timetable, LAX–ORD. Next up: a red-and-white 727. Western. L.A.–Las Vegas, maybe. Grand Pacific’s odds-on up next; they’re zero for the last eight takeoffs. But instead: Pan Am again. Zero for nine. Then TWA. Zero for ten. Continental: eleven. Finally, there it goes: Grand Pacific. The aquamarine bullet, a tail Suzy’s eyes read as lavender but that she knows to be striped red, white, and blue. It follows the others up the corkscrew and points itself north. San Francisco, Portland, Seattle. Suzy wonders who might be working today—who among the other girls got stuck flying on the Fourth like she has.

  It seizes her like a cramp: with no Grace and no Mike, with her strange presence at this beach party, she’s only just recognizing the radical isolation of being here, in this new place, without anything or anyone. January had become July in the space of a sneeze. It felt that quick—she closed her eyes to brace for her final semester and opened them here. The return to school after Christmas, after Grace and Mike’s wedding, was the last time she really breathed. Ever since: forward motion, momentum, speed—and on bearings set by autopilot override. The end of a whole bunch of things at school and the beginning of whatever this is. And yet for the first time in forever, Suzy feels herself stuck. Moving neither west nor east. Neither fleeing nor glomming on. Not taking off, but not landing, either. What she feels is the nonpresence of seventy-two degrees, the lack of sensation on her skin. It is weightless. It is seductive. The planes keep their rhythm, and Suzy pulls off her dress to keep from doing nothing at all. Which is when she is spotted.

  “I know you.” There’s a body standing beside her, a backlit figure made fuzzy around the edges by the sun.

  “You do?” Suzy says.

  “You were in Mrs. Riddlehoover’s class with me.”

  Tarred-up feet, floral swim trunks, and a white tank. Sun freckles and a pink nose, once broken maybe. A dumb mouth that’s fixed in a grin, the suggestion of eyes squinting behind Vuarnets. Long face, pinched as it falls like a fit upper body. Neatly swept white hair and sideburns that give the effect of a winter hat with tassels.

  “You sure?” Suzy says.

  “Then you moved away.”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong girl.”

  “No, no, it was definitely you. I’m pretty sure. You used to wear pigtails. Twist them up and out with paper clips—like Pippi Longstocking. Then you moved to Germany.”

  “That girl sounds pretty bitchin’, but sadly, not me.”

  His face—its white mustache on charred skin—gives the impression of a photonegative.

  “Do you have a sister?” he says.

  “I do, but she’s not from here, either, and doesn’t much look like me.”

  “So you’re not from here at all?”

  “I barely feel here now. I…I moved a month ago.”

  “Lemme guess…”

  “I’m sure you’ve got it.”

  “Which airline?”

  “You do have it figured out, huh?”

  “You’re not Pan Am.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You’d have told me already.”

  “Ha.” She says it just like that. “Go on. Three guesses.”

  “Let me see your hand.”

  “Come on.”

  He grabs it anyway. “Hmm. No international routes.”

  “Where do you get that?”

  “This line here. It means you’re way into America.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That and the bikini.”

  “It’s the Fourth,” she says. “Get to it, you’re avoiding the task at hand: which airline?”

  He closes his eyes and clasps both hands around hers. “No accent, so probably not Delta.”

  “No accent.”

  “A little everygirlish… American?”

  She grits her teeth and sucks in air.

  “Wait,” he says, certain. “Grand Pacific—definitely.”

  “Wow,” she says.

  He crosses his arms and nods at the bull’s-eye. He points at her palm again, to the answer there, and Suzy leans in to look closer. “I’m just bullshitting,” he says. “Shelly told me.”

  Suzy smiles—the kind that fails to conceal much, her wide mouth opening up half her face. “Shelly, the Howlers bartender?”

  “Yeah, she really was in Mrs. Riddlehoover’s.”

  “Is she here now?”

  “Yeah, over there. She said you were new. I love a new stew.”

  “She sold me out.”

  “Oh, she was being friendly. So, Suzy Stew…when’s your next flight?”

  “Oof, she told you my name, too?”

  His face shows that the slip wasn’t intentional. “Nothing more—name and airline. The important things.”

  “I don’t know if I believe you.” It’s probably nothing but a breeze, but it’s all at once cold beneath the nest of hair concealing the upper reach of her spine. “But since you seem to genuinely care: flying tonight actually.”

  “Tonight? No way.”

  “Red-eye to New York. Eleven forty-five.”

  “To New York? You’re kidding.”

  “Not the weirdest thing.”

  “Tonight at eleven forty-five to New York?”

  “Yeah, are you on the flight or something?”

  “Nah. I’ve never been. Seems kinda rough out there. How ’bout you?”

  She smiles again. “Yeah, I’ve been to New York,” she says. “I just haven’t flown this route yet. North-souths for the most part so far.”

  “Well, listen, the real reason I came over is to say you’ve got nice hands.”

  “You decided that before you even read my palm?”

  “I mean, I saw you react to that shot. Quick hands. Nice hands. Crazy-good reflexes. Do you play?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Oh, c’mon, everybody plays.”

/>   “I’ve tried. I tried last week. I can’t…” And she does the motion, overhead, searching for the word. “I can’t set.”

  “Can you drink?”

  “It’s probably a relative answer.”

  “I’m looking for a partner if you’re down.…”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “It’s cool, I’ll set.”

  “Aren’t we a little behind?”

  “They’ll burn out.”

  “I’ve gotta get somewhere pretty soon, I think. I’m waiting for a couple people. But thanks.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “My sister and her husband…boyfriend.”

  “Her husband-boyfriend.”

  “Depends on the phone you’re calling.”

  “Not following, but I dig the weirdness. Think I know ’em?”

  “Oh, maybe. Grace Whitman and Mike Singer?”

  “I bet I’d recognize them. They’ve lived here a month, too?”

  “Six months. At least my sister has for six months.”

  “Any kids?”

  “If she did, I wouldn’t be able to say so.”

  “Still not following.”

  “She wears wings.”

  “And she’s married. At Grand Pacific? Okay, I get it now. Secret’s safe.”

  Suzy puts her finger to her lips: “Shhh.”

  “I’m into it.”

  “Better if you’re not living with it, probably.”

  “You live with them?”

  “For now. Right up…” And she throws her hand over the hill at Nineteenth.

  He nods at the deck in the sand. “I’ve got the same board, by the way.”

  “Oh yeah? Where’d you stash it? I’m realizing now I probably shouldn’t have skated down.”

  “Nah, it’s fine, nobody’ll touch it.”

  “What if it’s taken by accident?”

  “My name’s carved on mine,” he says.

  “You’re daring them to steal it.”

  In an easy conspiracy, everything goes silent—on the radio the needle falls off the edge of the Nilsson record; the conversations shutter; three separate games on three separate courts, and no balls in play. But in just the way the sound vanished, it returns.