Fly Me Read online

  At the end of class Millikan reminds them that it’s important to study. That they could be the best natural pilots since Yeager, or more-articulate humanists about the poetics of flight than even he, Millikan—but that they won’t even get a shot if they fail the written exams at the end of the month.

  On her way out of the hangar, Suzy passes Millikan as he’s lighting a cigarette. She smiles, and he smiles back and says: “Don’t forget to hit the books, sweetie.”

  She worries her face: “Hope I can find someone to help me read.”

  Grace flies an up-and-back to Seattle the day of a Howlers show, and Suzy and Mike go for a drive. Suzy’s been itching to get behind the wheel since the visit to the Glen and the promise of the first flight class. So Mike hands over the keys. Suzy pushes the Karmann Ghia into testy revolutions in low gear, swishing around cars from the shoulder to the centerline like a fish navigating a reef—upshifting through the McClure Tunnel and bumping up to a strained fourth in a cleared-out stretch of PCH, low on the water, past the Jonathan Club, below the Palisades and the Getty, and finally into a big left-leaner to Malibu, where the beaches are narrow and the houses live restless, trembling at the suggestion of the next mudslide.

  Mike likes to drive when he’s not reading or writing or scheming about his magazine. He hadn’t spent any time in L.A. before the move. Grace bounced out after the wedding, and Mike wrapped things up in New York, ran out the last couple of months of his apartment lease. When he arrived, he bought the Karmann Ghia, mostly so he could go on “fact-finding” missions. He liked to drive out to the edges and work his way back in—south to Long Beach and way out east to Pomona. Up to the mountains in Pasadena and Burbank. Up the gut of the Valley—Van Nuys, Reseda, Canoga Park. He’d take notes, find people in gas stations and diners, wait for shoppers in parking lots. He didn’t have an especially clear sense of what he’d make of it all, but at the very least he was growing familiar with the map. Today they’re riding the western edge.

  On the way out Mike does most of the talking, all of which has to do with his magazine. It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of thing with the writers and the money, he says. Nobody’s gonna commit to a publication that doesn’t have funding, but financial backers aren’t interested in a new mag without at least a few marquee names. Mike’s spent the last couple months writing fan letters: high praise followed by deferent requests. “Should this thing get off the ground, could we count on you, Mr. Vidal, to write this kind of piece for a fall issue?” Sneak into Bohemian Grove with Governor Reagan. Follow a drop of water from a lake in the Sierras to a faucet in Brentwood. Shadow a retired and reclusive Sandy Koufax. Sit with Angela Davis and her team of lawyers to debrief them in the wake of her trial. Embed with a team building the first space shuttle in El Segundo. That sort of stuff.

  “I know someone who could help with that.”

  “Someone working on the shuttle?”

  “That guy from the Fourth—did you overlap at all? His dad worked on the X-15 and Saturn V.”

  “What parts?”

  “Dunno. ‘Airframe’?”

  “Can he get me an interview with Yeager?”

  “I’ll ask Dad Zar.”

  “This is good progress.”

  Suzy passes a brand-new Pontiac Ventura, and its driver speeds up to trap her in the left lane.

  “What an idiot,” she says, peeling into position. “I think I want to fly an X-15. That’s what it takes to get into Apollo, right?”

  “That and some other things.” He smiles. “You should probably join the navy first.”

  “But I have stewardess experience.”

  “No more moon program anyway.”

  “Mars, then. Test pilot. Mars. Then retire into flying the L.A.-to-Acapulco on Glam Air.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Or you could make me Aviation Editor of the magazine.” She’s struggled these last few days to think of much else besides flying. “That’s what Amelia Earhart was for Cosmo in the thirties.”

  “All right, Aviation Editor, first task: who should write about the defense industry in L.A.?” Mike says.

  “A woman.”

  The music has been fading to static, and as the road breaks away north at Point Dume, onto the far side of Malibu—the hills severing the line between the hood’s antenna and the radio towers in Burbank—the car goes silent and Suzy starts swinging out into the empty oncoming lane. Quick slip wide, then slowing things way down to a near stop, before slapping the gear shift up in a single gulpless breath—bah, BaH, BAH, BAAAH.

  “What’s my zero to sixty?” she says.

  “I dunno, twenty seconds?”

  “I think I’m quicker than that. Time it.”

  “On my watch?”

  “When I say go.”

  She brakes to a standstill right in the middle of the highway, where PCH points north toward the naval air station. A black sedan’s gaining fast and Mike’s glued to the side mirror, looking nervous but playing it cool.

  “Go,” she says, and upshifts like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake. Fifty, fifty-four, fifty-eight, sixty. “Now.”

  “Halfway between eighteen and nineteen.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “This car will do?”

  “I like this car,” Suzy says. “And I’m ever so grateful you let me screw around with it.”

  On the far side, near Zuma Beach, the terrestrial vibe of the undeveloped flatlands further removes them from the time and the trends and the politics of the east, a physical space with its back turned on the news. It’s also pretty clear out, sight lines up to Santa Barbara’s Channel Islands, air filtered of smoke, Suzy and Mike and the Karmann Ghia like a nearly drowned bug who’s crawled its way out of the milky cereal bowl of the L.A. basin. Fresh air and invisible light.

  “Maybe I should get me one of these.”

  “Yeah, you saving up?”

  “If I put twenty bucks away per paycheck and stop paying rent to you and Grace, I should have enough for a new car by the time I turn thirty.”

  “Speaking of which, we should head back soon to pick her up. Friday rush. If we get stuck in a little traffic in Santa Monica or Venice, we can probably hit the airport just as she’s landing.”

  “Fingers crossed for a Sig-Alert,” Suzy says.

  The following week there’s a day when none of them are working. It’s the first time since the Fourth that both girls are home with hours to kill. After running through the standard shower cycle and hoarding sections of the Times into separate rooms, the three make impassive attempts to figure out what to spend their day doing. The same options as always: Mexican food, the beach, the bars. Anything else involves the car. Mike suggests seeing something new—maybe checking out the homes of an architect named Gehry the Times wrote about last weekend—but the girls don’t feel like being on their way to anywhere on their day off, much less crawling through traffic.

  Grace has a way of sitting on the couch, two feet planted ten feet from the edge of the sofa, endless legs at full extension leading up into a body that’s flattened against the horizontal cushion, head and shoulders wedged into the L where a normal sitter hinges at the hips. It’s a position it is impossible to get up and out of. It’s how she reads. It’s how she watches television. It’s often how she naps. And she’s doing it now, barely listening, picking through the crossword.

  It’s hot, no fog this morning, what Suzy imagines to be an everyday Valley heat. The small room feels squeezed, the oxygen’s scarce, the roof and walls and floor pinched at each edge. There’s a lot of yawning.

  “Well, listen,” Mike says, “I’m gonna go to the market because we’re all out of food, and I might as well pick up something to cook a real dinner with. I just went Tuesday.…” He pauses. “We’re going through food too quickly. We’re burning through everything faster than we should.”

  Suzy looks up at him with a forehead like open window shutters. It’s not the sentiment, it’s th
e passive aggression. Especially after they got along so easily on the drive the other day. She knows she needs to find her own place, but what a way to say it. Mike busies himself at the kitchen island, acts as though he can’t feel her looking his way.

  “Hmm?” Grace says after a slack silence.

  “I’m gonna cook some steaks tonight. That okay?”

  “Oh, that’s a great idea. What can we do?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Cool,” Grace says, refusing to engage him. “We’ll go to the beach and pick up some wine on the way back.”

  It takes them a while to get going, Mike clattering in the kitchen, Grace dictating a shopping list and handing him some cash. He says he’s heading way downtown to see a new part of the city in the meantime, at least. He’s been reading a book called Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies—it encourages that sort of thing. He told Suzy all about it in the car when explaining his little adventures.

  Suzy tidies up. She packs her dirty clothes into her overnight bag, refolds her clean shirts and shorts in her allocated drawer. There, on the drafting table: five or six legal pads flipped a couple pages deep. New idea, new legal pad—each in a shallower state of abandonment. The Playboy investors had just declined involvement in the magazine. How long, Suzy wonders, will he give himself? How long, without editing a magazine, can he call himself a magazine editor? How long without publishing writing can he call himself a writer? It has become this inert enterprise, but anytime a new person asks—at a party, at a brunch, on a fact-finding mission in Koreatown—the answer comes without complication: Mike says he is a writer and an editor, making a new California magazine. Suzy knows that her knowledge of the real state of things—or rather, his knowledge of her knowing—is bittering him toward her.

  “I think it’s time to get my own place,” Suzy says when she and Grace settle down by the water.

  “Oh please, we’ve adopted you. Makes it so we don’t have to have kids yet.”

  “No, seriously, it’s time. It’s been two-and-a-half months. I need a real room, but more importantly I need to get out of your guys’ hair.”

  “I hardly notice you.”

  “Yeah…but you don’t work in the house. You’re on the road. You’re in hotels. I get the sense that I’m stepping on toes.”

  “Mike’s just in a funk. He’s crushed about the lack of financing.”

  “It is his house, though. And it’s his office. And he spends more time there than the two of us combined.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Please don’t. It’ll be a good thing to get out, I’ve got a little money now, I can—”

  “Not enough money.”

  “I can find a place, I’m sure. Or I can move into a stew zoo.”

  “You’re not living with those girls. And you’re not moving out. Suz, I know how much you make and I know how much it costs to live alone here.”

  “I’ll move to Westchester.”

  “You will not.”

  “All right, well, listen, how ’bout this, then: I feel a little uncomfortable. I feel like I’m walking on eggshells. I don’t want to spoil things with Mike. I’m sure as soon as I start even looking, things will get better.”

  “Okay, but you don’t sign anything without talking to me first.”

  Suzy is so very susceptible to her big sister playing a big sister. It’s a glaring weakness she recognizes in herself, but one she willingly indulges. In many ways she used to relish the worst injuries and illnesses for the sympathy Grace would show her. Grace wasn’t always there and she wasn’t often around for the second Suzy mistake. But Grace happened to be present and capable when it mattered most, and her sugar cut the pain every time. Suzy never sought to rely on Grace, but she always curled herself into the smaller shape when her sister actually made an effort to big-spoon her emotionally.

  The sand is hot—the top layer seems to caramelize. And yet it’s as crowded as Suzy has seen it since the Fourth. Mothers and children and a few dads who cut out after a slow August morning at work. The inland temperatures must be excruciating, triple digits in Riverside. Grace is mouthing something in a delicate register. Suzy’s ear narrows on it, but it takes a verse to find the melody and fill in the words: “Readin’ Rolling Stone, readin’ Vogue…California I’m comin’ home.”

  Suzy is somehow still working on Fear and Loathing. Oil tankers dock in the C-clamp of the bay, more tankers than Suzy has seen at any one time. They’re nearly identical and vertically stacked on the water. It’s like looking at physical frames of film, perfs and all, for a movie of a lone boat—one frame on top of another. The glut of tankers helps explain why there’s so much tar in the sand, the petrochemical link to the beach cities. Grace turns over and rubs some baby oil on her shoulders.

  The sun is covered by a pair of heads. Two women, one black and one white. The white woman asks Suzy and Grace how they’re feeling, and Grace shrugs apologetically, feigning deafness and signing, My name is Grace and I’m ten years old—a phrase she learned in elementary school.

  “Oh, I see. We love deaf people,” the woman says. “How about you? How do you feel?”

  “Hot,” Suzy says.

  “You know what else is hot?”

  Suzy doesn’t recognize these two, but she’s seen others like them around. Born-agains from that church on PCH, the one that’s run out of a strip mall.

  “Hell?” Suzy says.

  “Eternal damnation.”

  “So I got it right?”

  “I’d like to invite you to something,” the woman says, handing Suzy a flyer. “It’s tonight and I think you’d like it.”

  Suzy’s eyes locate the date and time and place—tonight, downtown L.A. That seems like a long way for people to go for a church that’s right in town.

  “I’ve actually got a dinner,” Suzy says.

  “Bring them along afterward.”

  “I’ll…I’ll float the idea to the table.”

  “It’s changed my life.”

  “That’s great to hear.”

  “I think it could change yours.”

  “I admire your conviction,” Suzy says. The woman’s partner is with another sunbather now.

  “What’s that you’re reading?”

  Suzy glances at the cover of the book—the demons in the convertible, the cacti and skull. “An account about…Christ’s forty days in the desert.”

  “That warms my heart.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m glad,” Suzy says. “Looks like you have a lot of flyers left to hand out before sunset?”

  “I hope to see you again sometime,” the woman says.

  The woman catches up with her partner, and Suzy watches them approach another pair on the sand. Suzy lies back and lifts the flyer to her face, shading herself from the sun. She reads from the top.

  REVEREND JIM JONES

  THE MOST UNIQUE

  PROPHETIC HEALING SERVICE

  YOU’VE EVER WITNESSED!

  BEHOLD THE WORD MADE INCARNATE IN YOUR MIDST!

  AUGUST 17 & 18

  8 P.M.

  EMBASSY AUDITORIUM

  9TH & GRAND

  LOS ANGELES

  She reads the small type, too. Reverend Jim Jones. The Peoples Temple. Started in Indiana, coming permanently to Los Angeles next month. So it’s not the local church, but out-of-towners. A congregation of four thousand and a mother temple on sixty acres in Redwood Valley. Salvation with an indifference toward race.

  There’s a photo in the corner of the flyer, darkly exposed, badly copied. Reverend Jones stands taller than the rest, a blocky head and a genial swoop of hair. He looks a little like Elvis. There’s his wife, older looking, plus “three of their seven adopted children”—each of a different ethnicity. She hasn’t heard of this man or this church, which doesn’t surprise her. But there’s something sticky about the picture. Something grand and utopian, warm and beneficent.

  Her eyes track to the very bottom, the smallest print
she didn’t even notice. “Reverend Jones, with members of the large interracial youth choir and orchestra, will be traveling in some of our modern fleet of air-conditioned Greyhound-type busses.” She imagines the motorcade rolling down the 101 now—the reverend, like the president, concealed in the automobile with the thickest windows and doors. She folds the flyer twice and pins it to her hip with her bikini bottom.

  Once Suzy can make out the pink on her stomach through the tint in her shades, she knows she’s past burned. They hoof it up and over the hill and back to the house. Mike’s in the side yard dumping briquettes into the Weber. He looks like he knows what he’s doing, and he tends to look better when he knows what he’s doing.

  “Good timing,” he says.

  Grace asks to borrow his lighter fluid so she and Suzy can clean the tar off their feet. Mike grills three filets mignons, green beans, and some cobs of white corn. But the coup de plate, to Suzy at least, is the handmade pierogi. She’s never eaten any before, but this is a Mike family recipe. The simplest, Mike says, of the sixty or seventy his grandmother brought with her from Poland in the twenties. He makes enough to last a week. Onion, sauerkraut, diced pork, and potato.

  “They had all this at the market downtown?” Grace says.

  “I didn’t go that far. The traffic was incomprehensible. I went to that place in Gardena instead.”

  “Not officially a new place, then.”

  “Well, figured it’d be better than baked potatoes.”

  The pierogi are good—everything is good. It’s probably the best meal any of them have eaten in weeks, not because the food is exceptional, but because Suzy knows homemade things of equal quality taste better than they do in restaurants, or on airplanes.

  Mike is visibly buoyed by the win. The girls forgot to buy wine, so they crack open a bottle of Jack, empty the ice bin into their glasses, and ease into the heavy, uncut syrup—the warm and heavy proof growing wetter and cooler by the second.