William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

Jackie tells me she’s leaving Nice next week to return to England. She wants to be a stewardess, she says, but only on domestic flights. Intercontinental ones, it seems, play hell with your complexion and menstrual cycle. Half-heartedly I offer the opinion that it might be amusing if, say, one day I should find myself flying on the very plane in which she was serving. Jackie’s face becomes surprisingly animated at this notion. It seems an appropriate time to exchange addresses, which we do. I notice she spells her name “Jacqui.”

This talk of parting brings with it a small cargo of emotion.

We kiss again and I slip my hand inside her T-shirt.

“No,” she says gently but with redoubtable firmness.

“Please, Jackie,” I say. “You’re going soon.” I suddenly feel very tired. “Well, at least let me see them then,” I say with petulant audacity. Jackie pauses for a moment, her head cocked to one side as if she can hear someone calling her name in the distance.

“Okay then,” she says. “If that’s what you want. If that’s all.”

She stands up, pulls off her T-shirt and slips down the straps of her bra so that the cups fall free. Her breasts cast no shadow in the unreal glare of the strip light. The nipples are very small; her breasts are pale and conical and seem almost to point upward. She exposes them for five seconds or so, not looking at me, looking down at her breasts as if she’s seeing them for the first time. Then she resnuggles them in her bra and puts her T-shirt back on. She makes no comment at all. It’s as if she’s been showing me her appendix scar.

“Look,” she says unconcernedly at the door, “I’ll give you a ring before I leave. Perhaps we could get together.”

“Yes,” I say. “Do. That would be nice.”

Outside it is light. I check my watch. It’s half past five. It’s cold and the sky is packed with grey clouds. I walk slowly back to Mme. D’Amico’s through a sharp-focussed, scathing dawn light. Some of the cafés are open already. Drowsy patrons sweep the pavements. I feel grimy and hung over. I plod up the stairs to Mme. D’Amico’s. My room, it seems to me, has a distinct fusty, purulent odour; the atmosphere has a stale recycled quality, all the more acute after the uncompromising air of the morning. I strip off my clothes. I add my unnaturally soft shirt to the pile on the back of the chair. I knot my socks and ball my underpants — as if to trap their smells within their folds — and flip them into the corner of the wardrobe. I lie naked between the sheets. Itches start up all over my body. I finger myself experimentally but I’m too tired and too sad to be bothered.

I wake up to a tremulous knocking on my door. I feel dreadful. I squint at my watch. It’s seven o’clock. I can’t have been asleep for more than an hour.

“Monsieur Edward? C’est moi, Madame D’Amico.”

I say come in, but no sound issues from my mouth. I cough and run my tongue over my teeth, swallowing energetically.

“Entrez, Madame,” I whisper.

Mme. D’Amico comes in. Her hair is pinned up carelessly and her old face is shiny with tears. She sits down on the bed and immediately begins to sob quietly, her thin shoulders shaking beneath her black cardigan.

“Oh, Madame,” I say, alarmed. “What is it?” I find it distressing to see Mme. D’Amico, normally so correct and so formal, displaying such unabashed human weakness. I am also — inappropriately — very aware of my nakedness beneath the sheets.

“C’est mon mari,” she cries. “ Il est mort.”

Gradually the story comes out. Apparently Monsieur D’Amico, sufferer from Parkinson’s disease, was having a final cigarette in his room in the sanatorium before the nurse came to put him to bed. He lit his cigarette and then tried to shake the match out. But his affliction instead made the match spin from his trembling fingers and fall down the side of the plastic armchair upon which he was sitting. The chair was blazing within seconds, Monsieur D’Amico’s pyjamas and dressing-gown caught fire, and although he managed to wriggle himself onto the floor, his screams were not sufficiently loud to attract the attention of the nurses immediately. He was severely burned. The shock was too much for his frail body and he died in the early hours of the morning.

I try to arrange my sleepy, unresponsive senses into some sort of order, try to summon the full extent of my French vocabulary.

Mme. D’Amico looks at me pitifully. “Oh, Monsieur Edward,” she whimpers, her lips quivering.

“Madame,” I reply helplessly. “C’est une vraie tragédie.” It seems grossly inept, under the circumstances, almost flippant, my thick early-morning tongue removing any vestige of sincerity from the words. But it seems to mean something to Mme. D’Amico, who bows her head and starts to cry with light, high-pitched sobs. I reach out an arm from beneath the sheets and gently pat her shoulder.

“There, there, Madame,” I say. “It will be all right.”

As I lean forward I notice that in her hands there is a crumpled letter. Peering closer I still can’t make out the name but I do see that the stamp is British. It is surely for me. The postal strike, I realise with a start, must now be over. Suddenly I know that I can stay. I think at once about Jackie and our bizarre and unsatisfactory evening. But I don’t really care any more. My spirits begin to stir and lift. I get a brief mental flash of Monsieur D’Amico in his blazing armchair and I hear the quiet sobs of his wife beside me. But it doesn’t really impede the revelation that slowly overtakes me. People, it seems, want to give me things — for some reason known only to them. No matter what I do or how I behave, unprompted and unsought the gifts come. And they will keep on coming. Naked photos, cold pizza, their girls, their wives, their breasts to see, even their grief. I feel a growing confidence about my stay in Nice. It will be all right now, I feel sure. It will work out. I think about all the gifts that lie waiting for me. I think about the Swedish girls at the Centre. I think about spring and the days when the sun will be out.…

The bed continues to shudder gently from Mme. D’Amico’s sobbing. I smile benignly at her bowed head.

“There, there, Madame,” I say again. “Don’t worry. Everything will be okay. You’ll see. Everything will be fine, I promise you.”

When Lieutenant Larry Pfitz lost his Phantom on his first mission, he decided, quite spontaneously and irrationally, to blame the Vietnamese people and Arthur Lydecker, a member of his ground crew.

Pfitz was a new pilot and his face was taut as he ran through the cockpit checks before being catapulted off the heaving deck of the U.S.S. Chester B. Halsey . The Phantom was heavy with four clusters of 500-pound bombs, and extra poundage of pressure was demanded from the old steam catapults. Pfitz was third in line and as the Chester B . heeled around into the wind, the deck crew noticed the way his eyes continuously flicked from left to right at the rescue helicopters hovering alongside.

There had been a ragged jeer as Pfitz’s plane dipped alarmingly on being hurled off the deck, before the straining engines thrust him up in a steep climb to join the other two members of his flight. The fourth jet was ready on the second catapult when one of the fire guards shouted and pointed up. There, in the pale-gray sky, Pfitz hung beneath his orange parachute. His plane flew on straight for a few brief seconds before tilting on one wing and curving elegantly down into the sea.

It was as well for Pfitz that, just before it smashed into the water, there was a muffled crack of explosion and a puff of smoke from the jets; otherwise the court of inquiry might have peremptorily dismissed his claim of a serious engine malfunction. Still, it left an uneasy aroma of doubt in the air. The Phantom had been new, flown over from Guam three days prior to Pfitz’s arrival, and the loss of several million dollars’ worth of expensive equipment for no real and pressing reason was regarded — even in this most extravagantly wasteful of wars — as a fairly serious matter. Pfitz was reprimanded for overhasty reactions, and as a measure of the captain’s disapproval was assigned to fly an old Ling-Temco-Vought F-8 Crusader that was stored in the back of the below-deck hangar until a replacement Phantom arrived.