Barry Hannah - Airships

We loved kikes and niggers, she continued softly.

Perhaps we just had too much confidence, she sighed. The rest was almost inaudible.

We were a handsome couple and knew it, besides — she gasped — talented.

She had thick blond hair and soft-set eyes and had once been a female polo player of some note on the greenest and wealthiest fields of the Carolinas and New York State. Furthermore, she had a style of being stylish that was the envy of thousands of the envious. Carlos was one of those who had coveted her in years past. He quivered in his garage that she was here at last.

Tell me the story of your life, Carlos said sternly.

At heart he was jealous and nosy, and he bit himself inwardly for his poor motives. In her automobile’s windshield he caught a reflection of himself in shorts, bald head, hairy Catholic titties.

Carlos and this woman were the same age, had gone to the same prep school in Boston, both rubes together there. He was from Santa Fe and she was from Alaska. But she got rid of Alaska very early, homed in Florida for seven years, was fourteen and bored in Pennsylvania; over to Boston, thence to college and New York, where she found Robinson among the hundreds of New Yorkers who managed to make a great amount of money for doing almost nothing at all but was pretty as a god and possessed of a voice like a French horn, so that at crucial parties he could say practically nothing and leave the impression among the more musically eared that profundity of the eternal sort had passed near. She was caught.

Her dad was filthy rich from a corrupt deal on the Alaskan pipeline. Everything was guaranteed for a blast of manna and romance. So they married. Robinson was a very clean man and shocked by the filth of the assault she made on him. He developed hobbies to escape her. But when he got ready and had grown to her needs and pressed her, she turned into a sort of brilliant nag who deserted him and had developed her own expensive hobbies. So that one day a helicopter landed on the roof of the club and took her off to the Caribbean. He went to the bar and, among the kind, garrulous blacks in their livery, he became a dreamer on alcohol.

She was faithful to him except for one night with drugs in her, given to her by a friend she trusted in Rio. Oh, Rio, Rio, Rio. Women are patient and men are not. Women are softer and carouse like feathers against each other. She allowed herself to be taken by the featherly Vera and, as she recalled, reciprocated somewhat. Some days she blamed it on the drug and some days she blamed her past, other days she blamed her glands, and on horrible bright days she blamed herself entire.

While in the meantime Robinson drove a lonely, horny and faithful course around the main cities of the nation, sometimes visiting a library or an observatory, making money hand over fist. He did it with the only talent he had never cultivated, his honesty. They bought snowmobiles from his company in Kentucky, because by that time the weather had turned very weird. All the upper South was white and frigid.

She did not tell Carlos much of this. Her story was full of modest lies that proved she had not had an interesting life at all. The taste of Vera came into her mouth as she thinned her tale. She censored one after another the scenes of bliss that she had passed, sometimes in the company of Robinson and sometimes when not, feeling like a lone released atom of rapture in Key West, in Charleston, in New York, in the sky over Ontario in Winston’s glider: oh, the quiet, oh, the blue, Winston at the stick, handsome but not a lover, just the best friend she ever had. Oh, the thick green forest, the fierce rocks below, the eagle who sailed tandem six feet from their window and turned to look directly at her face, as much as saying he was their friend; she had never imagined birds smiled when they flew.

Say, she said, if I’m going on with this, could I see the ship in the silo? Wouldn’t you let me?

Tell about your intimate life with Robinson, said Carlos, leading her around the garage.

The silo was about a hundred and fifty feet tall, about sixty feet around, bricks bright red from the rain and sleet, and there was something venerable about the thing even though it had been thrown up hastily around the ship only six months ago.

Perhaps because I want inside so much, she told herself. But there are limits to that too. Some things are worth perishing with as secrets.

I mean, the way you are together, this Carlos said, your spoiled little definition of love. It’s all been frightfully easy for you, hasn’t it? You copied my exam answers in prep school. I let you. You traded your beauty so openly I could kick myself, as if every one of your smiles were worth a dollar and a great deal of trouble. You used me as fodder for the ongoing of your beauty. But now we’re both forty-two, aren’t we?

Yes, Carlos. Would you let me see the ship?

Nobody can see the ship except the pilot and me. That is, of course, until we all get in it Saturday. But go on with your story. I’m amused by the trifling episodes you consider important. About your relationship with Robinson?

Wait. I’m not going to empty out myself for anybody about Robinson. That’s our secret, she said. If you want me to lower myself so I can get on the ship this way, I’m not going to. I’ll stay here and die with Robinson. Maybe we’ll screw each other to death on our bed. It has a brass bedstead and there’s a. . the whole ceiling’s a mirror, Carlos. It’s like looking at your own happiness. There’s nothing sick about it. Robinson always said the only sure thing the gods gave us was each other, all our faces and armpits and little skin rashes, she said.

Carlos winced. He wanted something gravely miserable. He had once married a girl from Grand Forks. They were both fat. She had hair on her back and her toes were black with fur. In fact, she was almost a man, seemed to have missed it by one flick of agitation of a gene. She dressed in cowboy fashion, jeans, boots, thirty-dollar hat now that she’d married a guy in the money. Carlos was a Presbyterian then, trying to be a preacher in Tucson, where Navajos started a fistfight during Carlos’s sermons and the women simply fell dead asleep, this being their only period of rest in the week. His wife ate near five pounds of food a day. She was a wonderful cook, but mainly for herself. She ate directly out of the big iron pots while the food was still steaming, using a big ladle. There was just enough left for him, time it got to the table. Sunday afternoons she would come in, no regard for his weariness after his sermon and the meal. Food gave her an insufferable burst of energy, as if she’d swallowed a pound of drugs. Carlos would be thinking about God, about what a wretched nasty trip it was in this world of clumsy sorrow, about the holiness of the Law, about converting to Catholicism because of its stubborn travel throughout history. She, who was dead now by heart attack in the act of fornication, would roll and swagger into his bedroom. “Get them trousers down, you little dude. Old Nancy needs some fun.” She outweighed him by fifty pounds. As she swelled to hard flab, her desires and etiquette became a miracle of irritation to him. She made him despise his own flesh, and drove him further into his meditations in the desert. Once he prayed the Lord to shorten his member and turn his testicles to ash. He viewed her as a sort of rabid hippopotamus cornering him in one bad dream after another. And she smoked five packs a day, often as not an ember between her lips as she rutted above him, spitting out fire all over him on the arrival of her moment. The last horror was when she thought she needed a child. She wanted to call it Buck or Francine, depending. She got melancholy and cried huge tears because nothing “took.” She had her heart attack trying again. Not only did she die on the spot, but he thought she was asleep, and suffered her weight until he smelled something odd.