No comment. Thank you. Goodbye.
Two
1
The persona of “the writer” does not attract me. As a way of being it has its flat sides. Nor am I comfortable around the literary life: its traditional dramatic line (the romance of solitude, of interior struggle, of the lone seeker after truth) came to seem early on a trying conceit. I lost patience somewhat later with the conventions of the craft, with exposition, with transitions, with the development and revelation of “character.” To this point I recall my daughter’s resistance when asked, in the eighth grade at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, to write an “autobiographical” essay (your life, age thirteen, thesis, illustration, summary, just try it, no more than two double-spaced pages neatly typed please) on whatever event or individual or experience had “most changed” her life. I mentioned a few of the applicable perennials (trip to Europe, volunteer job in hospital, teacher she didn’t like because he made her work too hard and then it turned out to be worth it), she, less facile, less careful, more sentient, mentioned the death of her best friend in fourth grade.
Yes, I said, ashamed. Better. You have it.
“Not really,” she said.
Why not, I said.
“Because it didn’t actually change my life. I mean I cried, I was sad, I wrote a lot about it in my diary, yes, but what changed?”
I recall explaining that “change” was merely the convention at hand: I said that while it was true that the telling of a life tended to falsify it, gave it a form it did not intrinsically possess, this was just a fact of writing things down, something we all accepted.
I realized as I was saying this that I no longer did.
I realized that I was increasingly interested only in the technical, in how to lay down the AM-2 aluminum matting for the runway, in whether or not parallel taxiways and high-speed turnoffs must be provided, in whether an eight-thousand-foot runway requires sixty thousand square yards of operational apron or only forty thousand. If the AM-2 is laid directly over laterite instead of over plastic membrane seal, how long would we have before base failure results? (How long would we need before base failure results was another question altogether, one I left to the Treat Morrisons of this world.) How large a base camp will a fifteen-hundred-kilowatt generator service? In the absence of high-capacity deep wells, can water be effectively treated with tactical erdlators? I give you Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844–1900: “When man does not have firm, calm lines on the horizon of his life — mountain and forest lines, as it were — then man’s most inner will becomes agitated, preoccupied and wistful.”
Tactical erdlators have been my mountain and forest lines.
This business of Elena McMahon, then, is hard for me.
This business of what “changed” her, what “motivated” her, what made her do it.
I see her standing in the dry grass off the runway, her arms bare, her sunglasses pushed up into her loose hair, her black silk shift wrinkled from the flight, and wonder what made her think a black silk shift bought off a sale rack at Bergdorf Goodman during the New York primary was the appropriate thing to wear on an unscheduled cargo flight at one-thirty in the morning out of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, destination San José Costa Rica but not quite.
Her sunglasses are pushed up but her eyes are shut tight.
A dog (underfed, mangy, of no remarkable size) is bursting from the open door of a concrete structure off the apron and racing toward her.
The man beside her, his head shaved, cutoff jeans slung below his navel, is singing the theme from Bonanza as he crouches and beckons to the dog.
We got a right to pick a little fight—
Bo-nan-za—
If anyone fights with any one of us—
He’s got a fight with me—
Her eyes remain shut.
On second thought I am not sure what would be, in this context, “appropriate.”
Possibly the baseball cap lent her by one of the refueling crew. The cap was lettered NBC SPORTS, its familiar peacock logo smeared with diesel fuel.
“Actually I think somebody was supposed to meet me,” she said to the pilot when the man with the shaved head had disappeared and the last pallet been unloaded and the refueling completed. Over the past dozen hours she had come to see the pilot as her partner, her backup, her protection, her single link to the day before.
“Looks like somebody didn’t give you the full skinny,” the pilot said.
Smell of jasmine, pool of blue jacaranda.
Coincidentally, although not really, since it was in the role of mother that I first knew Elena, Catherine Janklow was also in that eighth-grade class at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles. Elena’s performance as a Westlake Mom (so we were called in school bulletins) was so attentive to detail as to be impenetrable. She organized benefits for the scholarship fund, opened her house for picnics and ditch days and sleepovers, got up every Friday at four hours before dawn to deliver the Astronomy Club to remote star-watching locations in Lancaster or Latigo Canyon or the Santa Susana Mountains, and was duly repaid by the attendance of three eighth graders at her Westlake Career Day workshop on “Getting Started as a Reporter.”
“You’re at an age right now when it’s impossible even to imagine how much your life is going to change,” Elena told the three eighth graders who turned up for her Career Day workshop.
Two of the eighth graders maintained expressions of polite disbelief.
The third jabbed a finger into the air, then crossed her arms truculently across her chest.
Elena looked at the child. Her name was Melissa Simon. She was Mort Simon’s daughter. Mort Simon was someone Wynn knew who had improved the year by taking a motion picture studio private and spinning off its real assets into various of his personal companies.
“Melissa.”
“Excuse me,” Melissa Simon said. “But I don’t quite see why my life is supposed to change.”
There had been a silence.
“That’s an interesting point,” Elena had said then.
Catherine had not attended her mother’s workshop on Getting Started as a Reporter. Catherine had signed up for a workshop conducted by a Westlake Mom who happened to be a business affairs lawyer at Paramount (“Motion Picture Development — Where Do You Fit In?”), then skipped it to finish her own eighth-grade autobiographical essay on the event or individual or experience that had “most changed” her life. “What is definitely most changing my life this semester is my mother getting cancer,” Catherine’s autobiographical essay began, and continued for two neatly typed double-spaced pages. Catherine’s mother, according to Catherine, was that semester “too tired to do anything normal” because every morning after dropping the car pool at school she had been going to UCLA for what Catherine knowledgeably described as “radiation zapping following the exsishun [sic] of a stage 1 good prognose [sic] breast lesion.” That this was not a fact generally known does not, to me, suggest “motivation.”
Treat Morrison knew it, because he recognized the scar.
Diane had had the same scar.
Look, he said when Elena fell silent. What difference does it make. You get it one way or you get it another, nobody comes through free.
She sat on the dry grass in her black silk shift and the cap lettered NBC SPORTS and watched the L-100 taxi out for takeoff and tried to think what to do next. The cargo had been loaded onto flatbed trucks. Whoever was supposed to make the payment had not appeared. She had thought at first that the man with the shaved head and the cutoff jeans was her contact but he was not. He was, he said, on his way home to Tulsa from Angola. He was, he said, just lending a little expertise while he was in this particular area.