David Flusfeder - The Pagan House

‘What,’ Edgar asked his mother, ‘did you think you were going to be?’

The airplane was taxiing across the runway, delighting Edgar with the prospect of its speed. His mother gripped the armrest and asked him to keep still. Perhaps brutally, he had passed on the first of his two most interesting airplane facts: that for the first thirty-two seconds after take-off the pilot had no control over the plane and if anything should go wrong …—and here, Edgar maybe oversold the idea by crossing his eyes and cutting his index finger across his throat. But now he felt contrite and had decided to spare her the other of his interesting airplane facts and was trying to take his mother’s mind off things in a way that would be satisfactory to them both.

‘Or maybe what you wanted to be. When you were young, a child I mean.’

Mon made an attempt at a smile that showed the newish lines at the corners of her eyes that Edgar thought of as her Jeffrey lines. She had kicked off her shoes. Her toes wriggled in discomfort. Their cracked nail polish was a lighter shade of red than her hair.

‘I don’t know, Ed. A fashion model, a doctor, the usual kinds of things. I don’t know.’

She closed her eyes, the better to remember or invent herself as young, or just to hide, from Edgar’s questioning, from the impending fact of flight.

‘You know that if anything’s wrong you can call me at Hen’s.’

Edgar was flicking through the channels. He felt himself to be too old for the children’s TV and the children’s films. He didn’t care for action movies.

‘Nothing to go wrong,’ said Edgar, who believed this.

‘I’ll be with her a couple of days. They’re bringing the lunch trays around.’

Edgar turned his head to look at the stewardesses. Edgar liked the stewardesses. In fact, he liked everything about this flight. He liked the metal clasp of the seat-belt, the flaps that opened and closed on the wing, the heavy thrum of the engines, the blue tartan of the carpet, the overhead lockers, especially the one across the aisle that had been poorly secured and had emptied itself after take-off on to the head of a burly man in a business suit. And he liked the food they brought. He inspected it upon arrival partly in appreciation and partly because he knew that otherwise he would stare too much at the shape the stewardess made when she retrieved the meal trays from the lower shelves of her trolley, her legs together, her spine perfectly straight. And the touch on his arm from the back of her skirt when she bent to ask the burly man whether he would prefer chicken or beef ranked as number four in the most erotic moments of Edgar’s life.

‘Imagine,’ he said to his mother, after he had finished his lunch and eaten some of hers and was waiting for the film cycle to begin again, ‘if the plane caught fire, or the engines fell off. How long do you think it would take until we hit the sea?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mon said, looking away into the perfect blueness of sky.

‘You could guess. It wouldn’t happen straight away would it? Do you think it would be A, two minutes, B, four minutes, C, eight minutes, or D, none of the above?’

‘I really don’t know Eddie.’

‘Then your answer must be D, none of the above.’

She didn’t answer. She was looking queasy. It would be good for her to be away from Jeffrey, if only for a few days. The horrific idea that she might already be missing him was too grotesque to consider.

‘Which is in fact the right answer by definition because we’re over the ocean, not the sea. It was a trick question,’ he added apologetically. ‘But I think the real answer’s eight minutes, actually. Do you think they would know?’

His mother was performing her foot and ankle exercises. She extended her toes and revolved each ankle in turn and ignored him. Edgar leaned his chair back more abruptly than he should have, because it cracked against something, the knees he thought, of the divinity student sitting behind him, who yelled out a curse, and Edgar quickly said, ‘Sorry’, and pulled his seat forward and climbed over his mother and into the aisle.

He would have liked to go into a toilet to further test the void inside him, but the toilets were all full and he didn’t want to queue just to prove, again, his incapacity, and anyway the plane had started to bounce and dip, which he enjoyed, standing by the emergency-exit door, a surfer on the waves of turbulence, until a woman’s voice came over the intercom asking all passengers to return to their seats. He walked backwards along the aisle up to his row, past passengers who had blue blankets pulled up to cover their faces, as if when they slept all air passengers aspired to be female Muslims.

‘Old people get into a routine,’ his mother said to him on his return as if he had never been away and they had been having this conversation throughout, and Edgar wondered if maybe they had, if, thoughtfully or deceitfully, he had learned to leave part of himself, his boyish unsexual part, in this seat while the rest, the future part of him, had gone into the world to explore.

‘ Older people I should say, because your grandmother, I don’t know, has always seemed so very much alive. She does a lot of volunteer work and charity and things like that. She always had very enlightened political views, which is rare in that part of America. Your father was a big disappointment to her.’

Edgar frowned. He did not like to hear either of his parents being criticized by the other, especially not his father by his mother because she found it so easy to do and because she was so obviously right. It seemed to Edgar that the easier and more obvious it was to do something, the better it was not to succumb to the pleasure of doing it.

‘But what I mean to say—you are listening to me aren’t you? What I mean to say is that you’re going to have to be thoughtful, considerate. Staying in someone else’s house requires adjustments. And the younger you are the more considerate you have to be. We have responsibilities as guests.’

Edgar supposed his mother was right, but he resented it all the same. She took for granted all the adjustments that he was required to make, and did make, without announcing the whole fuss of it. He would not allude to any of that now, because he didn’t wish to compromise his own nobility of nature, but the gruesome sights of Jeffrey stretching on the sofa and the hair on Jeffrey’s feet and his silver toe ring were all in his head now and he didn’t know how to get rid of them.

‘Stop shaking your head like that. I’m right. And close your mouth. It makes you look stupid.’

Tears of outrage were not far away now. Thankfully, his mother responded to the heightening of his mood with a softening of hers.

‘Oh Eddie, I’m sorry. Let’s not be bad friends. I’m a nervous flyer at the best of times and going there, you know, when I used to, your father .’

She opened her arms for him to wriggle through and even though he was bigger now than when they used to perform this kind of manoeuvre, and both of them were wearing seat-belts, they managed it, and the smell of her reminded him of Sunday mornings before Jeffrey.

‘I wish I still smoked,’ she said, and before Edgar could point out that even if she did she still wouldn’t be able to do so on board the plane, she had yawned, promised him a snooker room, stretched, and announced her intention to sleep.

Edgar, whee ! He was loving it, in this plane, sipping a Virgin Mary, chewing peanuts, looking out of the porthole to see his own reflection bounced back with clouds. The noise that had been surrounding them throughout abruptly cut out—and the effect of the silence on Mon was to wake her up, startled: she gripped the armrest and Edgar watched with what he would call an investigator’s dispassion the tightening of her fingers, the whitening of her knuckles, the wrinkling of her skin.