He thought of Melissa, who by giving him a beer had penetrated into his considerations. In the last six or eight months he had been bewildered by the sudden interest men and women took in his company. They seemed to want something from him and to want it ardently, and although he was not an innocent or a fool, he was genuinely uncertain about what it was they wanted. His own desires were violent. While he was shaving in the morning, a seizure of sexual need doubled him up with pain and made him groan. “Cut yourself, dear?” his mother asked. Now he thought of Melissa. He thought of her—oddly enough—as a tragic figure, frail, lonely and misunderstood. Her husband, whoever he was, would be obtuse, stupid and clumsy. Weren’t all men his age? She was a fair prisoner in a tower.
Halfway through the feature, they got dressed and, with the cutout open and the radio blaring “Take It Easy, Greasy,” roared out of the Moonlite onto the Expressway, jeopardizing their lives and the lives in every car they passed (men, women and children in arms), but gentle St. Christopher or the mercies of the Holy Virgin spared them, and they got Emile safely home. He climbed the stairs, kissed his mother good night—she was studying an article in
Melissa had bought the plane tickets and made all the arrangements, and she asked Emile not to speak to her on the plane. He wore new shoes and a new pair of pants, and walked with a bounce in order to feel the thickness of the new soles and to feel the nice play of muscle as it worked up his legs and back into his shoulders. He had never been on a plane before, and he was disappointed to find that it was not so sleek as the planes in magazine advertisements and that the fuselage was dented and stained with smoke. He got a window seat and watched the activity on the field, feeling that as soon as the plane was airborne he would begin a new life of motion, comfort and freedom. Hadn’t he always dreamed of going here and there and making friends in different places and being easily accepted as a man of strength and intelligence and not a grocery boy without a future or a destiny, and had he ever doubted that his dreams would come true? Melissa was the last one to get on, and was wearing a fur coat, and the dark skins made her appear to him like a visitor from another continent where everything was beautiful, orderly and luxurious. She didn’t look in his direction. A drunken sailor took the seat beside Emile and fell asleep. Emile was disappointed. Watching the planes that passed over Parthenia and Proxmire Manor, he had assumed that the people who traveled in them were of a high order. In a little while they were off the ground.
It was charming. At the distance of a few hundred feet, all the confused and mistaken works of man seemed orderly. He smiled down broadly at the earth and its population. The sensation he had looked forward to, of being airborne, was not what he had anticipated, and it seemed to him that the engines of the plane were struggling to resist gravity and hold them in their place among the thin clouds. The sea they were crossing was dark and colorless, and as they lost sight of land he felt in himself a corresponding sense of loss, as if at this point some sustaining bond with his green past had been cut. The island, when he saw it below them on the sea, with a cuff of foam on its northeast edge, looked so small and flat that he wondered why anyone should want to go there. When he left the plane she was waiting for him by the steps and they walked through the airport and got a cab. She told the driver, “First I want to go into the village and get some groceries, and then I want to go to Madamquid.”
“What do you want to go to Madamquid for?” the driver asked. “There’s nobody out there now.”
“I have a cottage out there,” she said.
They drove across a bleak landscape but one so closely associated with her youth and her happiness that the bleakness escaped her. In the village, they stopped at the grocery store where she had always traded, and she asked Emile to wait outside. When she had bought the groceries, a boy wearing the white apron and bent in exactly the same attitude as Emile was when she first saw him carried them out to the taxi. She gave him a tip and looked up and down the street for Emile. He was standing in front of the drugstore with some other young men his age.
