Barry Hannah - Airships

I think women are closer to God than we are. They walk right out there like they know what they’re doing. She moved around the house, reading a book. I never saw her sitting down much, unless she’s drinking. She can drink you under the table. Then she’ll get up on the spot of eight and fix you an omelet with sardines and peppers. She taught me to like this, a little hot ketchup on the edge of the plate.

When she walks through the house, she has a roll from side to side. I’ve looked at her face too many times when she falls asleep. The omelet tastes like her. I go crazy.

There’re things to be done in this world, she said. This love affair went on too long. It’s going to make us both worthless, she said. Our love is not such a love as to swell the heart. So she said. She was never unfaithful to me that I know. And if I knew it, I wouldn’t care because I know she’s sworn to me.

I am her always and she is my always and that’s the whole trouble.

For two years I tried to make her pregnant. It didn’t work. The doctor said she was too nervous to hold a baby, first time she ever had an examination. She was a nurse at the hospital and brought home all the papers that she forged whenever I needed a report. For example, when I first got on as a fly in elevated construction. A fly can crawl and balance where nobody else can. I was always working at the thing I feared the most. I tell you true. But it was high pay out there at the beam joints. Here’s the laugh. I was light and nimble, but the sun always made me sick up there under its nose. I got a permanent suntan. Some people think I’m Arab. I was good.

When I was in the Navy, I finished two years at Bakersfield Junior College in California. Which is to say, I can read and feel fine things and count. Those women who cash your check don’t cause any distress to me, all their steel, accents and computers. I’ll tell you what I liked that we studied at Bakersfield. It was old James Joyce and his book The Canterbury Tales . You wouldn’t have thought anybody would write “A fart that well nigh blinded Absalom” in ancient days. All those people hopping and humping at night, framming around, just like last year at Ollie’s party that she and I left when they got into threesomes and Polaroids. Because we loved each other too much. She said it was something you’d be sorry about the next morning.

Her name is Jane.

Once I cheated on her. I was drunk in Pittsburgh. They bragged on me for being a fly in the South. This girl and I were left together in a fancy apartment of the Oakland section. The girl did everything. I was homesick during the whole time for Jane. When you get down to it, there isn’t much to do. It’s just arms and legs. It’s not worth a damn.

The first thing Jane did was go out on that houseboat trip with that movie star who was using this town we were in in South Carolina to make his comeback film. I can’t tell his name, but he’s short and his face is old and piglike now instead of the way it was in the days he was piling up the money. He used to be a star and now he was trying to return as a main partner in a movie about hatred and backstabbing in Dixie. Everybody on board made crude passes at her. I wasn’t invited. She’d been chosen as an extra for the movie. The guy who chose her made animalistic comments to her. This was during our first divorce. She jumped off the boat and swam home. But that’s how good-looking she is. There was a cameraman on the houseboat who saw her swimming and filmed her. It was in the movie. I sat there and watched her when they showed it local.

The next thing she did was take up with an architect who had a mustache. He was designing her dream house for free and she was putting money in the bank waiting on it. She claimed he never touched her. He just wore his mustache and a gold medallion around his neck and ate yogurt and drew houses all day. She worked for him as a secretary and landscape consultant. Jane was always good about trees, bushes, flowers and so on. She’s led many a Spare That Tree campaign almost on her own. She’ll write a letter to the editor in a minute.

Only two buildings I ever worked on pleased her. She said the rest looked like death standing up.

The architect made her wear his ring on her finger. I saw her wearing it on the street in Biloxi, Mississippi, one afternoon, coming out of a store. There she was with a new hairdo and a narrow halter and by God I was glad I saw. I was in a bus on the way to the Palms House hotel we were putting up after the hurricane. I almost puked out my kidneys with the grief.

Maybe I need to go to church, I said to myself. I can’t stand this alone. I wished I was Jesus. Somebody who never drank or wanted nooky. Or knew Jane.

She and the architect were having some fancy drinks together at a beach lounge when his ex-wife from New Hampshire showed up naked with a single-shotgun gun that was used in the Franco-Prussian War — it was a quaint piece hanging on the wall in their house when he was at Dartmouth — and screaming. The whole bar cleared out, including Jane. The ex-wife tried to get the architect with the bayonet. She took off the whole wall mural behind him and he was rolling around under tables. Then she tried to cock the gun. The policeman who’d come in got scared and left. The architect got out and threw himself into the arms of Jane, who was out on the patio thinking she was safe. He wanted to die holding his love. Jane didn’t want to die in any fashion. Here comes the nude woman, screaming with the cocked gun.

“Hey, hey,” says Jane. “Honey, you don’t need a gun. You got a hell of a body. I don’t see how Lawrence could’ve left that.”

The woman lowered the gun. She was dripping with sweat and pale as an egg out there in the bright sun over the sea. Her hair was nearabout down to her ass and her face was crazy.

“Look at her, Lawrence,” said Jane.

The guy turned around and looked at his ex-wife. He whispered: “She was lovely. But her personality was a disease. She was killing me. It was slow murder.”

When I got there, the naked woman was on Lawrence’s lap. Jane and a lot of people were standing around looking at them. They’d fallen back in love. Lawrence was sucking her breast. She wasn’t a bad-looking sight. The long gun lay off in the sand. No law was needed. I was just humiliated. I tried to get away before Jane saw me, but I’d been drinking and smoking a lot the night before and I gave out this ninety-nine-year-old cough. Everybody on the patio except Lawrence and his woman looked around.

But in Mobile we got it going together again. She taught art in a private school where they admitted high-type Negroes only. And I was a fly on the city’s first high-rise parking garage. We had so much money we ate out even for breakfast. She thought she was pregnant for a while and I was happy as hell. I wanted a heavenly blessing — as the pastors say — with Jane. I thought it would form the living chain between us that would never be broken. It would be beyond biology and into magic. But it was only eighteen months in Mobile and we left on a rainy day in the winter without her pregnant. She was just lean and her eyes were brown diamonds like always, and she had begun having headaches.

Let me tell you about Jane drinking punch at one of the parties at the University of Florida where she had a job. Some hippie had put LSD in it and there was nothing but teacher types in the house, leaning around, commenting on the azaleas and the evil of the administration. I never took any punch because I brought my own dynamite in the car. Here I was, complimenting myself on holding my own with these profs. One of the profs looked at Jane in her long gown, not knowing she was with me. He said to another: “She’s pleasant to look at, as far as that goes.” I said to him that I’d heard she was smart too, and had taken the all-Missouri swimming meet when she was just a junior in high school. Another guy spoke up. The LSD had hit. I didn’t know.