Fly Me Page 6

  “I feel like it should be daybreak,” Suzy says.

  “What do you mean?! Things are just getting going. Plus, you’ve got work in a few hours.”

  Suzy has worried all afternoon about this moment—the one from which she must fill the sails and push forward or just head home and level out before reporting to the airport.

  “I don’t know if I’m gonna make it,” she says. “I do know that that was unbelievable, though.” She balls up the tinfoil that had wrapped her Number One, scraps and droppings and all, shapes it into a perfect sphere, drops her wrist back over her shoulder, and flicks it, high arcing, into the trash can.

  Billy flames the tip of a joint he’s pulled from behind his ear and offers Suzy a hit. She squints at the joke. “So that doesn’t just bomb you out for the rest of the night?”

  Billy shrugs and focuses on something out in the darkness. Admiring the way his hair sprouts from his head, from near his ears, the lightness so convincingly embedded in each strand, she wonders if she’d ever have met someone, upstate or in New Haven or in New York, with a physical property like this one—the brown skin licked with a swirl of white up top, a composition so reserved to children that it seems certain to bleed out. Baby teeth vanish and platinum blonds go brown. But with Billy—and here is when her eyes begin to wander, administering a mapping from those translucent lashes to the fine cotton of his arms and legs and toes… She loses the thought. Snipped. If he feels her eyes, he doesn’t flinch.

  “So there are three parties tonight,” he says. “They’re all starting at roughly the same time and likely going until neighbors complain. It’s a lot.”

  “And here I thought you were Mr. Chillerzz”—she throws up a misconstructed shaka, pinkie and index, hook ’em horns instead of hang loose. “Mr. I Just Flow With It. Who wouldn’t possibly care about where the night is taking him, so long as it takes him there.”

  Billy pulls deeply from between his fingers. He peaks his eyebrows as though he’s never considered this. He fixes her hand, replacing her extended index finger with an extended thumb.

  “That’s not an unfair thing to say.” It’s a concession. “But you know, I’m not totally like the others. I like to know what’s happening, what I’m experiencing and what I’m missing. There’s an order to it all that I like to follow. I like to show up when I tell friends I’ll be there. I promise things to lots of people.”

  “An overpromiser…”

  “Well, it’s not overpromising if you always come through. I’m reliable, even if I’m not a lot of other things. I’m never not there,” he says. He smiles: discovery. “I like that.…Let’s make that the motto. Like on a business card: ‘Billy Zar: Never Not There.’”

  Suzy pushes her hair off her forehead and fixes herself still in the dim light. She hears a pair of sandals clapping down the walkstreet behind them. Not worth turning over her shoulder. But they’re louder than the others, don’t pass like the others. The steps cut off heavy and deliberate at their backs.

  “Billy, it’s Dan Francis.”

  Suzy turns. It’s already getting too dark for faces.

  “What’s up, Danny! I haven’t seen you in months. Grab a seat.”

  Dan Francis is a head taller than Billy, with hair like a hulled walnut shell. He’s closer to seven feet than six, and his body curls over. He keeps his hands stuffed in his jeans pockets.

  “Danny, this is my new friend Suzy. She’s from New York and just moved to Sela. I’m showin’ her the ropes.”

  “Hey,” Danny says, just real enough to be polite.

  “Danny,” Billy says, “was an all-state middle blocker. Then all-Pac-8 at ’SC. With the right setter, like he had our senior year, Danny gets that ball down inside the eight-foot line every time, am I right? A little butter off the fingertips on two?”

  Danny squints painfully, his cover in greater threat with each bio line.

  “That sounds super impressive,” Suzy says. “I’m sorry, though, that I don’t know all that much about volleyball.”

  “No, no,” Danny says, looking across Billy toward Suzy and putting his enormous hands up toward her. “I don’t…So, I’m here ’cause, you know, Mark and Greg told me you were the one, if I found you…”

  “Yeah, Danny, yeah. You did good. We’re gonna go somewhere else, though. Let’s talk about volleyball for now.”

  And so Billy asks Danny about life after USC, the six months in Europe when Danny played for a pro team in Sweden. And how after that it was either try to pick up some paychecks hustling on the beach or else give it up. The talk is pleasant enough but strained. Billy wasn’t like this with anyone at the party. It is the least accommodating she’s seen him. And Danny still looks itchy, impatient—a reluctant interview subject.

  The twilight extinguishes while they’re talking. The sodium lights on the Strand flicker to life and cast cones of orange once per block. Billy signals to Suzy like it’s time to go. No fireworks here, then. The three of them move north, in the direction of Mike and Grace’s place. Danny doesn’t say much, but Billy continues to narrate stories about the houses along the waterfront.

  When they get to Mike and Grace’s street, Billy stops and thumb-hooks the straps of his backpack.

  “Well, cool,” he says to Suzy. “You’re for sure making it out tonight, right? I still have to give you that thing.”

  He hasn’t mentioned it since the beach at noon.

  “All right, maybe,” Suzy says. She’s still catching up to the fact that they’re parting.

  “No maybes, it’s important. It’s an important thing.”

  He’s weirdly grave as he says it.

  “We’ll see…,” she says, hoping he’ll smile.

  “I’ll be home till nine or so,” he says, looking around, distracted. “Number’s 545-1089. Hit me up, okay?” Suzy rests on her heels. She kinda can’t believe it. No fireworks together. Billy offers a waist-high low five, and after a distended beat she swings in with an exaggerated slap of his palm. Danny stands to the side, squinting up the alley and shifting his weight around. “Seriously: I’m counting on you tonight, Z.”

  “Talk soon, dude,” she says, and Danny follows Billy along the Strand.

  Suzy starts up the incline to the house but then turns back toward the beach and then again back toward the house. She lets herself believe it’s nice to be heading home with plenty of time to spare.

  Suzy keys in through the front door. She prepares herself for Mike and Grace’s line of questioning, for their double-person presence in the cramped living room. But she can tell right away that the house is empty. Everything is visible from the front door: the living room–slash–dining room, the island counter and cupboards, the kitchen with the Hotpoint fridge, the table surfaces spread with magazines. The black holes spinning off the corpus of the living room: Mike and Grace’s bedroom; the shared closet; the bathroom; and Mike’s office, where Suzy sleeps. She should really start looking into finding her own place. This house is big enough for no more than two and a quarter full-time residents. The lights are off and she keeps them off. It is so still. There are two notes on the counter:

  Mom and Dad called AGAIN

  and

  Walked to the market to pick up chicken and veggies to grill tonight. We’ll get enough for you if you’re around. xoxo, G.

  It makes her feel better—not so suddenly alone.

  Suzy kicks her shoes into the corner of the room and arranges herself in the nook at the end of the couch. She pulls her legs up so that they stretch the length. She forgot to turn on the television but is reluctant to lift herself right back up. A heavy silence pours into the curves of her ear like plaster into a cast. She knows she’s not going back out. She feels guilty. But this is fine, this is all she can expect from herself anyway.

  Evenings at home aren’t so bad. Holiday evenings especially. She has to work; it’s not a waste of a night. Plus, Mike and Grace will be back soon. She looks for something within arm’s reach. A cros
sword puzzle, but no pen. A sleeve of photos from a road trip Mike and Grace took in May to the central coast. And under a cushion, an issue of New York magazine—the cover a full-framed blonde with roller-coaster hips, pressing out toward Suzy, nude or bikinied except for a pair of triple-scoop vanilla ice cream cones she holds in front of her tits. Her mascara is so thick it seems applied by a stew school instructor. It is a summer special issue. A hundred and ninety things to do before the season passes—swimming topless at Fire Island, a sex show on East Broadway, a private booze cruise on the Hudson. There’s a big story by Gail Sheehy about prostitutes in Times Square. A piece of a series. Suzy starts to read. Sheehy pulled on a leotard and a leather skirt and sat in the corners of motel bedrooms while the girls went about their work.

  Suzy moves through the issue until she’s out of pages. A hundred and ninety things no one who is anyone could miss that summer. On the table, on a neat stack beneath the crossword puzzle, she finds three other issues. Mike has them everywhere. New Yorks and Rolling Stones and Esquires, Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune. Inspiration for his own writing, for his own magazine. Envy, too. Inspiration, envy—twin fuel sources.

  She reads these ones right through as well—Jack Nicklaus on the cover of SI; Groucho Marx on Esquire, THE GOOD LIFE OF A DIRTY OLD MAN. She hears the first bang of fireworks at the pier. She considers hopping to her feet. But she’s fixed in place.

  She knows this feeling and the fluid in her nerves goes cold.

  During the spring term Suzy grew addicted to Dave. She grew addicted to his scale. To his left part and his gray eyes. To a face that was not yet famous, but that would be one day, it had to be, it was preordained. A face and a voice, a voice a Keats might call mellifluous. Lowish and pure. She worked in the library and he worked at the Palace. On busy nights she’d help deliver drinks—for big ones like Carly Simon, Billy Joel, Steve Miller, Pink Floyd. She started picking up tips, and the theater hired her as a cocktail waitress. They’d see movies together, too—Cabaret in a March blizzard, The Godfather downtown during a week of April rain. Or they’d sit for hours in front of Dave’s record player while he squeezed long runs of improvisation from the pentatonic scale, practicing little phrases five, ten, twenty times through before moving on to the next.

  It was a good arrangement. He was an embodiment of ambition seen through. Dave who was supposed to be at Yale. He was, back in her senior year in high school, precisely who she felt like she’d be missing the opportunity to meet by going to an all-girls school. He was the young man mothers said existed at most colleges even though they only really existed in New Haven. He studied history and politics and planned to work at the Pentagon or Langley. At least, if the band didn’t work out, if they could get him to give up the New York music thing, which at that point he was already thinning on. He’d missed the boat on law school for the fall, but he seemed to be relieved that elbowing around for gigs on the Bowery, that life, would only be temporary, a capsule of youth to crack open at future dinner parties.

  The real plan, the blood ambition, was familiar pedigree—the kind that seemed administered by a rubber stamp at Yale. On paper, Dave’s father worked for DOD, but Dave knew he was CIA. He’d spent long stretches of Dave’s childhood abroad, leaving him and his brothers to two-v.-two lacrosse in the fenceless backyard in McLean. The line was always London or Paris, but Dave would snoop through his father’s cash when he got back and find bills from Eastern Europe and Africa. His mother worked at the National Gallery as a curator. She specialized in portraits of Colonial and early-American statesmen, Founding Fathers and their wives. She was a social chair at the Sulgrave Club, and she and the other members were proud of Dave for supporting the introduction of women (by dating one) to his university. Dave was good for Suzy.

  Still, though, all winter she’d been dealing with this strange new physical ailment: a waking paralysis. She’d be lying in bed, somewhere between sleep and consciousness, and her foot would fail to respond to her command, the signal cut off. She’d try the other leg, her fingers, her arms—nothing but fuzz. She’d attempt to speak and the sound would be smothered. And then she’d see it—the specter in the room, the visitation, moving about at the periphery of her frozen gaze. Sometimes it would be a family member, other times a friend. Any attempt to move would prove futile, and she learned that the only way out was through sleep, drifting her mind down a dark staircase until she returned via a natural snapping-to of consciousness.

  Suzy spoke to someone at Yale and learned that it was a diagnosable condition, related to anxiety, something that dated back thousands of years. It was the condition, her doctor told her, of the actual “night mare”—the visiting demon to the subconscious. The doctor asked her to identify any overlaps among the episodes, and the best she could come up with was that in each case she’d opted out of something frivolous—coffee with a classmate at the Rock, a reading by a young novelist Camille admired, a Stevie Wonder show in Hartford—only to be seized by regret shortly thereafter.

  She was never exactly where she was convinced she should be. The whole thing, it seemed, was wrapped up in an anxiety of mislocation.

  All semester, while she sat in her apartment writing perfect little meaningless chapters for Camille, she’d been growing overwhelmed by a sense of uncertainty. For four years there had been no cause greater than herself and her studies, no intention beyond the pleasure of completism—turning the last font-blocked page of a novel to the blank one beneath the back cover; reading till the end of the Revolution; safely plagiarizing Susan Sontag and Elizabeth Hardwick; submitting a blue book with one, small, safe original idea. She’d raced to this juncture without much thought. But with graduation fast approaching, there was, for the first time, true freedom of choice—and it froze her up.

  One evening, late and drunk, after a night of big, leisurely B sides and wire-tight radio singles colored by the red and blue gel filters of the Palace, Suzy indulged a monologue of concerns to Dave. There was no one around to tell her that, say, October 1972 would be a month where it was critical to be present in Philadelphia. That during that month she’d meet the man or woman who would turn her on to the thing that would finally help her figure out what she was truly after—that would set the moving parts into motion to arrange job and spouse and ultimately home. That there would be a place and a time where it wouldn’t feel like it was all happening elsewhere.

  Dave pointed out, with aggravating reasonableness, that it might not be the exact right answer for Suzy or Dave or any one person specifically, but that New York seemed as hedged a bet as any.

  He was right. And for a little while that conviction served as an antidote to the specter that had been plaguing her. There was a new calm. And when Dave changed his mind about law school and got back-doored into Columbia, following him to New York seemed fully actionable for the first time. They could spend June at his parents’ summer place in Narragansett—one last month, Dave kept saying, of clean air and open windows—and then ultimately move into his uncle’s spare studio near the river on the Upper West Side. An apartment his uncle sold as “close to the classroom, closer to Gristedes.”

  Middle of April, Grace came to visit. She’d worked a flight into Kennedy and trained up for a night. The Eagles were in town, playing the Palace, which Grace defined as irony to several people who asked where she was visiting from. Fly across the country to see the local boys. Watching Suzy shuttle drinks back and forth across the room reminded Grace of her very finest idea.

  “What are you doing after May?” she said.

  “I still don’t know. But I want to go to New York.”

  “For Dave.”

  “With Dave, for me.”

  “And what are you gonna do for money?”

  “I could work at a club or something. Start talking to some alumni.”

  “New York is disgusting.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s the most dangerous place in America!” Grace finish
ed her drink, and Suzy moved to get her another one, to signal to her manager that she’d taken an order, that she’d been working, not chatting. “Thank you. But it really is the pits. How often have you even been there without me or Mom and Dad?”

  “Plenty of times.”

  “Like once a year?”

  “No! Once a semester.”

  Grace smiled. “And?”

  “I love it.”

  “How come you’ve never mentioned it before? How come you hardly ever visited when I lived there, if you love it so much?”

  “I didn’t love it then, I didn’t know yet.”

  “But you know now.”

  “Maybe I can work for a magazine. My thesis adviser says I should go and do that, try to think about writing, even.”

  “How come you’ve never said anything about writing before?”

  “This is what professors do, this is the point of college.”

  “There are magazines in Los Angeles.”

  “Mike’s magazine doesn’t count.”

  “Mike’s magazine does count. What does New York have that Mike’s magazine doesn’t have?”

  “Mike’s magazine doesn’t exist yet.”

  “You could be in on the ground floor.”

  “Rolling Stone. New York. The Village Voice. All the stuff Mike did. That’s not even what I’m talking about, though. I want to work from the bottom. Opportunity from the feet up.”

  “You’re moving because of Dave.”

  “Dave will be there, so what?”

  “Well, listen, you don’t really have a plan—and that’s fine, seriously. But what if you signed up for stew school?”

  “I’m not going to stew school.”

  “It’s not fancy enough.”

  “It’s not fanciness, it’s just—it’s your thing.”

  “Listen, you don’t have to tiptoe. I know how things are. I know what I am and I know what you are. But this is a short-term thing. No one does it their whole life. As much as I’d love to try…”