A Child across the Sky Read online

  Getting out of the taxi I looked up and saw her standing there, waiting four feet away. I had so much on my mind and was so surprised to see her close up that the first thing I said was, "Did you want this breast?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Uh, this cab. Do you want the cab?"

  "Yes, please." Her look said she thought I had a few screws loose. I got out fast and held the door for her. She had on a nice woody-smelling perfume. I almost asked her name but held back. Did I really want to know who she was? Then she would only be a Leslie or a Jill. A name, a zip code number, a Diner's Club member. Slamming the door behind her, I smiled and was happy for the first time that day. I don't know why. It made going back into my empty apartment that much easier.

  After Phil saw my New York place for the first time, he laughed and said, "'A Room in Brooklyn,' huh?" Later that day he went out and bought me a copy of The Notebooks of Louise Bogan. In it, he'd marked this passage:

  Edward Hopper's 'A Room in Brooklyn.' A room my heart yearns to: uncurtained, hardly furnished, with a view over roofs. A clean bed, a bookcase, a kitchen, a calm mind, one or two half-empty rooms. All my life wants to achieve, and I have not yet achieved it. I have tried too hard for the wrong things. If I would concentrate on getting the spare room, I could have it almost at once. . . . I must have it.

  There are two pairs of pants in my closet, only five books allowed in the apartment at the same time. It sounds pretentious and pseudo-Zen, but living like this has been both painful and instructive for me. In my heart I am the perfect Yuppie because I like things. At one time I was a walking UN of prestigious labels and loved it. Italian leather jackets, English suits, cashmere sweaters from Hilditch and Key in Paris. Give me quality things and lots of them. If they have initials on them that's okay too – I don't mind being a walking advertisement. One of the delights of being a movie director was you were expected to wear those things because of your position as a young creative lion out there. The spoils of the battle of Hollywood: Once you'd made a film that went into the black, they encouraged you to put on your first Patek Philippe wristwatch. You took your wallet out of a Miyake pocket, and the light you turned out at night was designed either by Richard Sapper or Harry Radcliffe. Long live excess!

  But after I moved to New York, I got rid of everything on purpose. Maybe because I liked it all so much, maybe because it was just simpler living in a room that was furnished only with air and white walls.

  I'd come back from a year in Europe where I'd lived in the kind of pensions where you peed in the toilet down the hall and if you wanted a shower you paid extra for it. At the beginning of the trip I carried a five-hundred-dollar knapsack from Hunting World. It was promptly stolen in the Cracow train station. The rest of my year abroad was done via a Cracow fiberboard suitcase, Polish suit and shoes, and a loden coat I bought at the Vienna flea market for four dollars.

  I'd read Thoreau's "Economy" and the Lives of some saints, but until the earthquake and the Europe trip, I didn't agree that life was better with less. Or that less was more. The lesson I did learn after Cracow was all those lovely expensive things in my missing bag were not indispensable and could be replaced. Too easily. How could they be so special if you could go right out and buy another, or ten, if you wanted?

  So when I got back to "Morka" (as Phil called it) I got rid of a lot. Moved into a New York life with my Polish suitcase, a copy of Cullen's just-published Bones of the Moon, and a real desire to see if there were any other windows to look out besides the ones I'd known for the last couple of years.

  But I kept two wonderful things from my "old days." I had to; it was hard to erase the movie director from inside me. Besides, I wasn't sure I wanted to. I kept a small video camera and the television video system I'd bought when loaded with residuals from my film Sorrow and Son.

  Without taking off my coat, I turned on the TV and video machine and plugged in the first tape. Squatting in front of the set like a catcher waiting for the first pitch of the game, I rubbed my cold hands together.

  The electric gray buzz and hiss cleared. Phil's face appeared. He was sitting on the couch in his living room petting Flea. The dog was lying half on him, attentively gazing into the camera. With all those impossible, hilarious wrinkles it looked like an alive hot fudge sundae.

  "Hello, my man. I'm sorry about what happened. You know I love you and will miss you most of all. You were the only brother I ever had. I love you more for that than anything else. You-you-you: I'm saying that too many times.

  "Danny and I met a few days ago. He'll be able to answer most questions you have. But please don't ask him anything until you've done two things: watched the rest of this tape all the way through and then called Sasha. Another thing – don't be shocked by what you see. You have some very hard stuff to do in the next few months. I hope some of what you see here will help you get through it.

  "How do I know? I just do, Weber. That's part of the reason why I'm dead when you see this. Can't handle it. But I think you can. There are others who do too.

  "One last thing: You won't be able to watch the second or third tapes until you've been out to California. You'll see what I mean."

  The dog saw something in the camera's direction. Looking straight at me, it started to bark. Phil smiled and petted the dog back into silence. It looked at him and licked his hand.

  "I love you, Weber. Don't ever forget that, no matter what."

  He put up a hand and waved slowly: goodbye. The picture dimmed. A moment later everything began.

  My mother died in an airplane crash when I was nine. She flew off to visit her family in Hartford, Connecticut, but never returned. The airplane ran into a flock of starlings on takeoff and, like some silly cartoon, sucked the birds into the engines. Then it stalled. Then it crashed. Seventy-seven people died. They found Mama's handbag completely untouched (there were still traces of perfume on her handkerchief) but could only identify her carmelized body via dental charts.

  When they told me the news, the only thing I could think of was whether or not she had died quickly. In those days I was completely intrigued by airplane crashes, intrigued the way any preadolescent loves the macabre and dangerous from a distance. So long as it didn't bite or want to come into my living room, I would press my nose as close as I could up against its glass. But suddenly my wonderful mother was gone. The thing was loose in my life.

  Unfortunately I learned enough from reading articles and gaping at pictures of catastrophes to know it could have been any of a thousand possible hideous falls to death in those last few minutes, or seconds, of life. Had her end come fast? Slow? Painfully?

  They were questions that haunted me thirty years. Whenever I flew, I looked around the cabin at curtains that could burn, seats that might snap in half or send their jagged pieces through a body like medieval weapons. . . . Her body had burned and that was bad enough, but was the burning "all"? Was there more – worse – I didn't know? Why did I want to know?

  I cannot say, but Phil's video answered my questions.

  The first thing I heard was a muffled, phony voice speaking.

  "Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain, Mike Maloy. Welcome aboard flight 651 to Washington. Our flying time will be approximately one hour and fifteen minutes."

  It took a moment to register that I was inside an airplane cabin, seeing it all through someone's eyes. A tracking shot. Several women wore pastel-colored Jackie Kennedy pillbox hats; men had short hair and read the Hartford Courant dated March 1960. "I" looked down at my lap and finally knew in a furious flash of recognition who I was – my mother. There was her red leather purse, the gray dress she wore only on special occasions. I'd sat on their bed the day she left and watched her carefully fold the dress in half and place it in her suitcase.

  "When'll you be back, Ma?"

  "Tuesday, dear. I'll be back before you're home from school."

  The pilot went on speaking. My eyes, Mama's eyes, looked out the oval window
at the runway and the little yellow trucks scuttling back and forth on the ground below. The plane revved up and began to move backward.

  I saw through her eyes but had my own thoughts. Terrified and captivated, I knew exactly what was about to happen. Was this the way God saw things? Did he kick back in his leather Barcalounger upstairs and flick on the tube to someone's life in peril? The same way we sort of watch and get interested in the fate of soap opera characters?

  What should I have done, stopped the film? All my life I'd wanted to know what these last minutes had been like for her. The questions around her death had been the basis of much of my young confusion, not to mention the inspiration for my first film, The Night Is Blond.

  The man next to Mama offered her a copy of Time magazine. Fidel Castro was on the cover. She thanked him but said reading on a plane made her ill. He tried to make conversation, but she only smiled and busied herself with the seat belt. I remembered how nervous she became when strange men spoke to her. She was good-looking but shy; my father had won her through gentle persistence. She said she'd first fallen in love with his patience.

  Her slim hands were so familiar. The gold engagement and wedding rings that slipped on and off her finger so easily whenever she washed her hands. The shiny scar above her thumb where she'd cut it deeply one day while making lunch.

  The plane turned hard left, then began to taxi. A stewardess came by offering a bowl of hard candy, Mama's favorite. We often joked that she had a mouth full of sweet tooths. This last time she took two – an orange and a green. She looked out the window again at the nice weather. Some purple-gray clouds far off in the southern sky. In an hour and a half the plane was due to land in Washington. In an hour and a half firemen would still be trying to control the flames that licked up at the clear Hartford sky. She put a piece of candy in her mouth. The plane began to pick up speed. A blond stewardess hurried down the aisle toward the back of the plane, a nervous smile on her face.

  The plane goes faster and faster, the view out the window begins to blur. Then that fast, stomach-lurching lift off the earth and the hard pull up.

  A few seconds going up, up. . . .

  A loud fast thunk-thunk-thunk. Thunkity-thunkity. Everything stops. Just stops. The whole plane feels . . . it's falling backward, crazy angle up and all. Someone screams. More screams. Explosions. I choke. The candy's gone down my throat the wrong way. I can't breathe! Choking, trying to get it out. Explosion. Dead.

  The screen went dark, then lit again on Philip Strayhorn's face. "She was dead in half a second, Weber. One big blow she didn't even feel. I promise you that. I know it for sure.

  "There's more on this tape you must see, but not now. You can watch your mother's part again if you want, but there's nothing new to be learned. That's how it happened.

  "Call Sasha, okay?"

  The tape went black again, then turned into the electronic fuzz that's so annoying at the end of any video film. I reached over and fast-forwarded it a count of one hundred, then pressed PLAY again: fuzz. Rewound it to the beginning, replayed a little of what I'd already seen: Phil in his living room with the dog. FAST FORWARD: Mama being offered candy again. More FAST FORWARD: fuzz.

  I reached down for the other tapes (SECOND and THIRD) and tried them both: fuzz all the way. For no reason at all, I put the first one in again and ran it up to the end. "Call Sasha, okay?"

  But this time there was more.

  A little fuzz, then his face again. I jerked back like I'd been slapped.

  "This tape goes on and gives you more and more, Weber, as you can see. You've obviously tried the other two now and seen they don't work. But they will, later, when you're ready. Like this one. The more you discover, the more the tapes will tell you. Sort of like deciphering the hieroglyphics." He smiled. "The ride starts here, Scruno. I wish I could have gone on it with you, but I tried and it ate me.

  "Don't let that worry you, though. I'll still be around in here, in these tapes. I'll be able to help you in some ways. Remember Kenneth Patchen's line? 'It may be a long time till morning, but there is no law against talking in the dark.' Call Sasha, huh?"

  2

  Sasha Makrianes's mother was Russian and her father a Greek, one of those lucky people who invent something ridiculous like the disposable lighter and become instantly rich. Alexandra inherited not only a ton of money but the deep-set brown eyes and high cheekbones that make an attractive Russian or Greek woman intriguing, but also dark and a little scary. The words "gypsy" or "revolutionary" are in there somewhere.

  Sasha and I were introduced in Vienna by friends. Although her arm was in a sling, my first impression was I couldn't imagine her ever losing, or being used. Her life must be an obedient and loving pet she led around on a silver leash without much thought. She looked spoiled but also strong and decisive. It struck me if she'd been poor she'd probably have had the same aura.

  How wrong I was! A week before we met, she'd broken up with her boyfriend of two years. Her arm was in the sling because on leaving the restaurant where they'd had it out, she had stepped into the street, blind and finished, and been hit by a taxi.

  "Our relationship was always thin as a spiderweb anyway: delicate and lovely, but the slightest breeze broke right through it. It got so he was like a ventriloquist with his hand up my back, moving my lips – I was so afraid of saying the wrong thing.

  "Love is a bully, you know? It can't be avoided and it can't be held off at arm's length. It arrives or reappears or descends or whatever, and we might as well throw up our hands and just hope for the best, right?

  "My analyst told me I ran away from my boyfriend the way a child runs when being chased by a parent – you know, laughing and yelling and looking over her shoulder the whole time, dying to be caught?"

  She didn't stop talking, although after the initial boyfriend flood, most of what she said was interesting. But there is a certain pathos and desperation in the person who never lets anyone else speak.

  That first evening was nearly asleep by the time we left my friends' apartment together and walked down Bennogasse to her car.

  "Whenever I go to the Easterlings' house for dinner, I feel like an ugly frog swimming through an aquarium full of colorful, gorgeous fish. You know what I mean?"

  I stopped walking and took her hand. "You're so tight. What's the matter?"

  "You're Weber Gregston! You made the greatest film I ever saw: You made Wonderful. You think I'm an asshole, don't you?" Undoing her hand from mine, she stepped back. "I was so excited to meet you. I didn't want you to see this stupid arm and I didn't want to say the wrong things . . . I wanted to hear you talk. . . . Now I fucked up again –" She tried to say more but tears stopped her.

  A beautiful woman with her arm in a sling standing on a street corner in Vienna in the middle of the night, crying, is a good picture for a movie, but not real life.

  I asked her for coffee, and we went across the street to a big shabby cafй that was all yellow light and old cigarette smoke. I even remember the name: Cafй Hummel. No one hummed in the Cafй Hummel.

  Her father was just diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer. Her boyfriend left because she bored him. She wanted to do something else with her life. We talked in the cafй until three, then went back to her apartment and mistakenly made love. It wasn't very good.

  But something more important happened in that charged night and during our next few days together. A friendship began that immediately did us both good. Soon we liked each other so much we knew we'd found something vital and necessary.

  On impulse, we dropped everything and went to Zermatt together for a long weekend because it was snowing all over Europe that winter.

  There are places in the world with which one falls in love with the passion and vitality we usually save for a great love affair. We see it and know from the first this will be right and long. If we're very lucky, our being here now will add dimension and knowledge to our lives later.

  When we made love there, it was
without the held-breath passion of the beginning of an affair. It was gentle, unhurried and long: two great friends on a walk together through a wonderful, familiar city.

  The day we left, we sat out on the balcony of our hotel room and held hands, looking up at the Matterhorn. We were tired and fulfilled, in love with a moment in our lives when we'd made the right decision and it had led us to a treasure of high ice, silence, and Schlagobers in our coffee.

  "Escape can be expensive, but sometimes it's more necessary than breath, huh?"

  "What do you mean?" The late-afternoon light had grown tired and tan.

  "This whole trip has been . . . before we got on the train in Vienna, I turned around and looked at the world there. In one part of me I knew that after this trip, no matter what happened between us, things would never be the same again. Something was coming to an end for me. So . . . so I looked at Vienna as if it were somehow the last time.

  "I don't do things like this, Weber. I don't go off for weekends with people unless I'm in love. We both know we're not in love. But this time has lifted me off that 'old me' earth back there. It showed me how things look from a good distance.

  "It's showed me it's time I went home to America. Knowing that my friend but not my love, Weber Gregston, will be there soon makes it better. Thank you."

  She went back a week later to be with her father while he died. We wrote often while I roamed around Europe, and she flew to California when I returned. The sexual part of our new history was over, but we were still so glad to see each other again.

  I introduced her to Phil Strayhorn. At first, they scared each other.

  She knew him more as a writer: had read every one of his "Midnight in Hollywood" columns in Esquire and loved them. When she heard he was my best friend and that I wanted her to meet him, she rented the first Midnight film. And turned it off, shouting "Enough!" after ten minutes.

  "What does he look like?"