The man said nothing, just looked at her without gesture, his expression so intent he seemed unwilling to be bothered. She, though, felt the pleasure to be had from only watching, of having to make no comment. The cool breeze, the nice expansive water view to Islesboro, a kite standing aloft were quite enough.
Then her mind flooded with predictable things. The crippled man’s shoes. You always thought of them. His were black and sockless, like bowling shoes, shoes that would never wear out. He would merely grow weary of seeing them, give them away to someone more unfortunate than himself. Was this infuriating to him? Did he speak about it? Was the wife, wherever she might be, terribly tired all the time? Did she get up at night and stand at the window staring out, wishing some quite specific things, then return to bed un-missed. Was pain involved? Did phantom pains even exist? Did he have dreams of painlessness? Of rising out of his chair and walking around laughing, of never knowing a chair? She thought about a dog with its hind parts attached to a little wheeled coaster, trotting along as if all was well. Did anything work down below, she wondered? Were there understandings, allowances? Did he think his predicament “interesting”? Had being crippled opened up new and important realms of awareness? What did he know that she didn’t?
Maybe being married to him, she thought, would be better than many other lives. Though you’d fast get to the bottom of things, begin to notice too much, start to regret it all. Perhaps while he was here flying a kite, the wife was in the hotel bar having a drink and a long talk with the bartender, speaking about her past, her father, her hometown, how she’d thought about things earlier in life, what had once made her laugh, who she’d voted for, what music she’d preferred, how she liked Maine, how authentic it seemed, when they thought they might head home again. How they wished they could stay and stay and stay. The thing she — Nancy — would not do.
“Do you want to fly our kite?” the man was saying to her, his voice trailing up at the end, almost like Tom’s. He was, for some reason, smiling now, his eyes bright, looking back over his hairy round shoulder with a new attitude. She noticed he was wearing glasses — surprising to miss that. The kite, its silky monofilament bellying upward in a long sweep, danced on the wind almost out of sight, a fleck upon the eye.
“Oh do, do,” the little girl called out. “It’ll be so good.” She had her arms spread wide and up over her head, as if measuring some huge and inconceivable wish. She was permanently smiling.
“Yes,” Nancy said, walking toward them. “Of course.”
“You can feel it pulling you,” the girl said. “It’s like you’re going to fly up to the stars.” She began to spin around and around in the grass then, like a little dervish. The wheelchair man looked to his daughter, smiling.
Nancy felt embarrassed. Seen. It was shocking. The spacious blue bay spread away from her down the hill, and off of it arose a freshened breeze. It was far from clear that she could hold the kite. It could take her up, pull her away, far and out of sight. It was unnerving. She held the toy Wagner to give to the child. That would have its fine effect. And then, she thought, coming to the two of them, smiling out of flattery, that she would take the kite — the rod, the string — yes, of course, and fly it, take the chance, be strong, unassailable, do everything she could to hold on.
Abyss
Two weeks before the Phoenix sales conference, Frances Bilandic and Howard Cameron drove from home — in Willamantic and Pawcatuck — met at the Olive Garden in Mystic and talked things over one more time, touching fingertips nervously across the Formica tabletop. Then each went to the rest room and made a private, lying cell phone call to account for their whereabouts during the next few hours. Then they drove across the access road to the Howard Johnson’s under the Interstate, registered in as a Mr. and Mrs. Garfield, and in five minutes had chained the door, turned up the air conditioning, pulled the curtains across the sunny window and abandoned themselves to the furious passions they’d been suppressing for the month since meeting at the awards banquet, where they were named Connecticut Residential Agents of the Year.
What had occurred between them at the awards banquet was something of a mystery to them both. Seated beside each other at the head table, they’d barely spoken before being presented with their agent-of-the-year citations. But after the first course, Howard had told a funny joke about Alzheimer’s disease to the person seated on his other side, and Frances had laughed. When Howard realized she thought he was funny, their eyes had met in a way Frances felt was shocking, but also undeniable, since, in her view, they’d each experienced (and fully acknowledged) a large, instinctual carnal attraction — the kind, she thought, animals probably felt all the time, and that made their lives much more bearable.
Within fifteen minutes, she and Howard Cameron had begun exchanging snickering asides about the other winners’ table manners, their indecipherable wardrobe choices and probable sales etiquette, and all the while avoiding the dull, realtor shop-talk about house closings, disastrous building inspection reports, and unbelievable arguments customers routinely waged inside their cars.
By dessert, they were venturing into more sensitive areas — Frances’s junior college roommate Meredith, who’d died of brain cancer in June at thirty-four (Frances’s age); Howard’s father’s tachycardia and his unfulfilled wish to play Turnberry before he died. Napkins across their empty plates, they moved on to life’s brevity and the need to squeeze every second for all its worth. And by the time decaf arrived, they’d eased over onto the subject of sex, and how misunderstood a subject it was in the culture, and how it was all the Puritans’ fault that it even was a subject, since it should be completely natural and unstigmatized. They each spoke lovingly about their spouses, but not that much.
Seated at the long head table full of fellow award-winners and bosses, and directly in front of a Ramada Inn banquet room full of noisy, laughing people they didn’t know but who were occasionally casting narrow-eyed, flaming arrows of spite through the two of them, sex infiltrated their soft-spoken conversation like a dense, rich but explosive secret they, but only they, had decided to share. And once that happened, everything, everyone in the room, everything Frances and Howard planned to do later in the evening— drive home to their spouses, Ed in Willamantic, Mary in Pawcatuck, down dark and narrow, late-night Connecticut highways; the chance visits they might have with zany colleagues at the bar; voice mail they might check for after-hours client calls — any and all thoughts about this night being normal ended.
Most Americans don’t even begin to reach their sexual maturity until they’re not interested in it anymore, Frances observed. The Scandinavians, indeed, had the best attitude, with sex being no big deal — just a normal human response (like sleeping) that should be respected, not obsessed over.
Americans were too hung up on false conceptions of beauty and youth, Howard agreed, sagely folding his long arms. He was six-foot five, with big pie-plate hands and had played basketball at Western Connecticut. His father had been his high-school coach. Howard had dull gray, closely spaced eyes and still wore his hair in an old-fashioned buzzed-off crew cut that made him look older than twenty-nine. Orgasm was way overrated, he suggested, in contrast to true intimacy, which was way underrated.