NINE
Emma drove southward into gathering rain on her way to Binghampton to gather her daughter, driving toward the place where, days before and--as they say-- after all these years, she first met Flynn again. Flynn, the white knight, the protector of damsels by da road.
It seemed long ago and far away.
She had heard the awful ping and thud when the Charger threw a rod, seen the spray of oil and the single foul cumulus of exhaust, and pulled to the roadside, waiting off the shoulder of 81, just outside Syracuse.
Great, she had thought, no daughter and now no car. Having nothing to lose, she stepped out to the shoulder, waiving gaily to the passing traffic whooshing by. Whooshing back at them.
Flynn was not the first to stop for her, only the most obvious. First was a sleezo in an old Ford, who looked directly at her silicone tits, so leering and obvious she wanted to take out one of the floppy little prosthesis packets and hand it to him. Here's a tit, son.
He tinkered under the hood and brushed his bony hips against her skirt while she leaned next to him, then he slammed it down and promised to call a tow truck if she really wouldn't take a ride with him. He had a silver crown on a front tooth, very military-penitentiary and without any of the charm of the long-lost love with gold and emerald inlay.
Next was a harried man in another Ford, this one a suburban station wagon with a wood side manque. He emerged babbling nervously that he knew nothing about motors, cars, or anything for that matter, and she wanted to give him a long hug and a warm, deep kiss full of tongue, and send him off home to Liverpool and his wife.
She didn't even bother to show him the oil slathered motor, just asked him to promise to call a tow truck since she didn't trust the silver-toothed leerer.
The man nodded nervously and hurried back to his wagon, thankfully unGalahad, signalling carefully and rather endlessly as he ventured back onto the highway from the shoulder.
A girl could get lucky here, Emma had thought. End a life alone and settle down by the highway.
Just then what was to be Flynn slowed down in the opposite lanes, southbound to the city, the Maserati gearbox whining down in a fine low purr. She saw him negotiate the downward shamrock and emerge like a low grey cloud, a little low-slung bullet of polished metal coming toward her, gears meshing with awkward grace.
Molly, I think we've hit it now, she thought; and then out of the car came Flynn.
"God, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven," sayeth the white knight. "Seeing someone as beautiful as you are beside the road alone."
It was winningly fresh and uncomplicated, and she had to applaud.
"Don't you want to see my engine first, Flynn," she said and watched as his eyes popped at her naughty-girl voice.
He laughed, thank god, and asked how she knew his name.
"From ball?" he said.
"From life," she laughed back at him.
They went to have a drink at the Holiday Inn, calling the wrecker from there. It would conceivably be the third such call to random towtrucks, Emma knew, and she had visions of them tearing the Charger apart, like sharks caught on to a wounded dophin.
"Tell me," he said, "it isn't fair to hold it against me..."
He was trolling little cauliflower heads through the awful herb dip, crunching them in his teeth and swallowing them down, tan even in candlelight.
Even so, Emma thought, this is a worried man.
She decided to seduce him, turned horny by a roadside stand.
"Your car smells now," she said, unanswering. "Christmas in July?"
She drew a little circle on the back of his hand, all very movie-ish, quite the coquette for a lady upon a dead charger. Flynn looked frantic. He wanted to know, he always wanted to know what she knew.
A game's a game she thought he thought.
Play with me amid the salesman.
"Aw come on..." he groaned.
"Botticeli!" she said.
"That's your name..."
"That's my game..."
All smiles Emma essayed the dip with a curled carrot, making a "V" of propwake on its green studded face.
Flynn made the sound conventionally spelled whew, and leaned back, expanding his lordly shoulders and fabled arms.
Settling in for the duration, she thought.
God Flynn I'll rub your muscles up, boy, if you give me the chance.
"What will happen?" she asked.
"To us?"
Now she had to laugh.
"I was thinking of the car..." She laughed again.
"They'll tow it in to the station and let it sit until you tell them what to do."
"To do?" she asked. "When I've got me a wandering boy with his own silver cloud?"
"Aw for chrissakes," Flynn said, "a silver cloud's a Rolls Royce and anyway I got too much on my mind for all this crap..."
Emma looked hurt. She was hurt.
"Ugly noun," she said and plunked a yellow fringed broccoli floweret in the middle of the pond.
"You can take me to the station, Mr. Flynn," she said primly, "and I'll hold on to my name and my dignity both."
He caught her eyes, there was no denying that the boy had his hold on one. She could see him trying to put it all together.
It doesn't go together, Flynn, she thought, it just goes.
"I'm sorry," he muttered.
"No, I am."
"Really," he pleaded now, "I am sorry. I'm just under pressure."
So are we all, thought the mother alone, bereft of spawn, having left same with father. Her mood was returning.
Think of it as show and tell, Mr. Flynn. Mister Win. In the morning, we'll have homecoming and I'll be your breathless prom queen.
"That's the one where you guess the initials?" he asked.
"What is?"
"Botticeli."
Aha, thought Emma, let's go to your room. Our revels are all ended.
A lonesome salesman danced with a bar girl. Emma's drink melted to a salty pool, little lime slice athwart on the bottom like a wounded greengill.
"Marguerita," she said.
He smiled, unfooled. Always under him there was this squareness, she liked, unexciting and excited.
This is the safest of all, she knew, knowing one unknown to one. A night with a white knight (she even thought this then), followed perhaps by a slow ride home on an unsilver cloud.
"E.L.C."
"What?"
"The Botticeli clue..."
He waved to the bunny-tailed waitress and a drink appeared on naked hips, low slung cheeks peeking under the girl's fishnet hose. She made change from between her gold-lame tits, a little nervous about all that green tucked into her flat floppers.
There was a team of fey go-go-boys played the north country bars, Flynn. Rumor is the ladies tucked similar green into silver codpieces.
"Thought you said TLC..." he said.
Emma hummed. "Mmmm, I could of..."
He laughed square again. It was fun to play with one so fair, thinking of sliding palms over oiled muscles and rump.
What am I doing? Emma thought.
It's that bastard LaChaise, she thought, seeing him looking at my daughter like that sets the sap running.
She laughed and Flynn did not know why.
She choked upon the salty puddle of the drink.
Sap, she laughed. LaChaise was that. I loved him once.
I loved him twice...
"What is it?" square Flynn said.
"Thinking of a chair I used to sit upon," she said, and choked again, giggly now. Tia Maria gone to her head.
Oooo I'm quite drunk, low slunk, vegetable dunk, Flynn...
She was giggling crazy now, even to her.
"It is rather a clue of sorts," she said in her best British voice, gaining composure in her musculature if not in her giggly tummy.
She changed to a story-telling woo-woo tone, the one that scared Molly when she thought she saw bunny eyes.
"Once I was the chair, en effet, but I changed to Lady Luck on unmarriage day..."
She touched Flynn's nose!
He let her hand die there.
"You should get a room," he said.
And you get a womb, she did not say.
She woke, mostly naked, atop a gold brocade, untouched she knew, on one of two double beds. Flynn had set her down carefully there, she remembered, after a maze of spinning red walls and a sideways elevator. The room, too, spun and once when it whirled her stomach up, she'd run to the little tile bath, spewing a trail like a sour comet. She came out to find him, patient, cleaning her throw up up. And this is true love, she thought, to clean up after Lady Luck.
It was after that she had felt him, gently gently, unbutton, unslip, unbra, unlove and cover her. Evidently some spew had soaked her; this boy was a saint.
And he'd seen what she didn't have, she knew. And he sat in a chair in the middle of the night in always unlovely Syracuse, light from a blue eye washing over his brown face. The all night cable spinning a web of sports score shadows on the walls and him, Flynn, awake and almost unmoving, crying in a brocade chair.
She woke, like you do when you've been or are drunk, feeling a little below yourself, as if underwater. Above you there is haze, and then at a lower, heavier strata, your body. Below haze and body you lie, an aura, momentarily clear-minded, yet afraid to swim up through body and haze, afraid to resume the mantle of all that has put you down here.
He cried in small, convulsive waves, like someone silently laughing, each wave of tears shaking those great, broad shoulders, head jerking with each wave like a wise man nodding.
He wore a Blue Jays teeshirt for chrissakes.
She considered surfacing with a tough little joke. I couldn't have been that bad, could I, Flynn? But then she didn't.
Why would a man cry before a television in Syracuse?
Ha! she thought, that's reason enough.
She gathered herself enough to kneel on the bed, sitting back on her haunches, the brocade pulled around her like an extravagant squaw. The first wave of dizziness nearly put her down again. A little gulp of sour bile rose and fell like a ball propelled by a carnival sledgehammer. It was just short of the bell. She cursed Mexico and drinks with salt upon them and sat there awhile, collecting her forces, watching the man cry.
Molly, I need you, she thought.
"Who the hell are you?"
So he had known she was there. He drew a large handkerchief from the pocket of his blue jeans. I am your daughter, she thought, for my father used to also use a great white cloth to wipe his tears.
"I'm your queen, Flynn," she said.
Little hammers bonged within her forehead like a vibraphone when she spoke.
He caught his breath in a great wheeze, and then cried a little despite his effort.
"Oh please..." he moaned, "please cut that crap."
O, it wasn't crap, that ugly word, it was another clue. She had been a prom queen, he a prom king. Different proms, but a single past. If he remembered her, he would know.
Emma LaChaise had first met Jack Flynn eight years before, in 1971. She was no one then, a quiet wife in long skirts and long hair and bare feet, not bustling but moving slowly, sensuously, about, cooking great leaden gobs of bulgar and horrid greens for the vegetarian Yves, last of the French hippies and cabinet-maker deluxe of Westminster Park and other snooty islands and shores.
Yves of the flowing hair, the Guy LeFleur of jerks.
Yves of the bony ass, father of her child.
Yves the little boy, all wired because this famous baseball player no one ever heard of wanted him to do a job for him, a job that scared the shit out of him because he wasn't a boatwright and he didn't know a hull from a hatch and the boat was an antique, a St. Lawrence skiff, a secret gift for Flynn's father.
"But it's just the same, eh? It's a matter of joining wood, no? We make this one..." he said, turning the this to zis more for effect than for heritage sake, "and we make a picture, no? Ever'one can see that Mr. Jack Flynn has Yves do zis skiff, and, voila, we arrive on the gravy train, no?"
"No," Emma had said, but by then this response was too much an institutionalized joke between them, and also Yves was too wired to listen to reason.
He had danced around the shop in the way he had, tossing chisels carelessly into wooden boxes--doubtlessly chipping them irreparably, Emma thought, thus forcing him to leaf through his beloved, full-color catalogues of British steel tools and expensive Japanese saws--and swinging the giggly Molly in his arms.
Jack Flynn was number four hundred and eleven of Yves' versions of the promised land. Doubtlessly, Emma knew, the scenes in '71 had planted a subliminal time-bomb which led to Molly's adolescent hero worship later.
Doubtlessly, Emma knew, she had grown a little fond of Flynn then.
She remembered the day Flynn was to come to Yves' workshop. It was Yves who was bustling then, putting cool jazz on the tape player, carefully setting out his newly purchased picture book of antique boats, shooing Emma out to the store to buy brie and tinned pate and wine beyond what they could afford.
He's like a big kid, Emma thought, and he probably never saw a baseball game in his life. It was not the job, she knew, not the SS Gravy Train, but the prospect of dealing with the major league star.
"Zis is business entertaining, no?" he'd said as he urged her toward the stores, his Quebec accent growing each moment in anticipation of the pitcher.
"And when Molly gets back from her grandmother's, she can eat the scraps of brie, no?" said Emma glumly.
Yves, the big goop, missed the sarcasm.
"Mais oui,Mais oui, my Emma of the waters..."
He'd danced her about then and she had to laugh, and, for whatever reason, she'd changed into the long, lacy white gauze dress when she got back, carefully trying different undies to gauge their effect, before rejecting them all.
It was to be the honeymoon they never had, with Molly gone to Grandmere's, and Emma wasn't quite ready to lose that, no matter who else's darling Yves might be on his long days on the islands.
Flynn arrived near sunset, hours late, the water and islands a lavender haze under the tangerine sun. Yves was a little sullen by then, drunk on jug wine and just short of opening the Chateauneuf they had been carefully saving for this client. One of the oblong cubes of pate was already collapsed in a smear, with a rubble of bread shards dotting the Spammy smelling surface.
Flynn arrived apologetic with a lean, silent black man in his attendance like a shadow.
"Wolfman had engine trouble outside Buffalo, we spent all afternoon in a hangar," Flynn said between the sorrys.
Hearing this impossibly romantic excuse, and seeing Flynn in company with what seemed a black bodyguard, threw Yves into animation and exaggerated versions of negritude. He cranked up the cool jazz and began to talk of Miles, he uncorked the Chateauneuf with a mighty whoop, and he wiped his hands repeatedly on the long leather apron, as if to assure the ballplayer that this hippy affectation was his everyday shop wear.
O, he wears the leather constantly now, Emma knew, Yves de la Binghamton, craftperson extraordinaire, heart throb of coeds and housewives. Including his zucchini bride, her potato-head kids.
Flynn declined the wine and bread and settled for Emma's Tab and Frito Lay ripples. Wolfman watered down his Chateauneuf with cold water from the tap, and he made the pate into a fat sandwich. Emma began laughing then and hardly stopped all night. It became a lovely party.
Flynn talked hockey first.
"I play it in my dreams," he said. "Sometimes I'm out there skating alone on white, white ice, rushing down the left wing, my hair flowing behind me... Suddenly there's a goalie all dressed in black, head to toe. I know he's grinning behind his black mask... I shoot, and I never see if I score..."
Emma laughed and laughed then and Flynn broke into a little grin. He had announced the story as a fright, she thought it funny.
"Tis death, little lady," Wolfman said quietly, but then he laughed too. Yves gave her the look that said she was a fool, and she laughed more.
He kept trying to turn the conversation back to baseball, to "dee Ezpo" as he called them, and Flynn always talked about Les Canadiens. It was very funny really.
Finally, when they were all good and drunk except him, Flynn took out the polaroid pictures of the boat. It looked like someone had stepped through the bottom of it, springing the boards, and Emma laughed then too.
Wolfman laughed in a low ho-ho-ho. Emma had her head on his lap, having placed herself there shortly after Yves passed the hashpipe and glared at her for hanging so closely on the black man.
She liked the way the white gauze looked against him.
And she hated also how Yves and Flynn had talked about her like she was a pet poodle.
And she was high, so high she needed a jet-man, a wolf-man, to get her down.
She was hanging on Wolfman to tease Flynn, she knew.
Flynn and Yves discussed the boat.
"I know you've never done this work," Flynn said, and Yves waved instinctively toward the fat and expensive coffee table picture book. "But I want someone who knows good wood and how to use it. I figure you can learn the rest...I want this to be a beautiful thing, you know, for my father...I want him to have the most beautiful boat in the world..."
Emma raised her eyebrows at him. If he had been drunk, it might have been less extraordinary a thing to say.
She wanted to cry then. It was such a hopeless thing for a man to say. Didn't we all want that for our parents? Beautiful boats to convey them along the dark river?
Instead she spoke.
"You should have him build it new then."
Yves was surprised, and Wolfman grunted beneath her. She meant it though, say what you wanted about Yves, he loved wood and the ways it could form itself into things.
He made her a tulipwood thing once, a little gingaw, no more than a polished curve, a sculpture. It was a beautiful thing, it made you happy to hold it.
"It's a dildo for a goddess, no?" he had said when she asked him what it was.
It gave her thought, though she never tried it, thinking that, like Cinderella's slipper, it did not do to test yourself against perfection.
Yves was a slunk, but he knew how to do what he did.
Flynn had taken a long time responding to her suggestion.
"I thought of that, Maam," he said, "but my Dad has the river right up in his bone marrow, you see, and I want him to feel it in the wood under him, if you know what I mean. Anything less and he'd know...you know?"
"I know," she had said.
"I know," she said to Flynn as he cried before the Syracuse television.
She had risen up, her forehead booming, and moved to touch him, the brocade wrapped about her like a cape. He shuddered at the touch and pulled away. It was awful to see a man crying like this. I know, she said, but she did not know, it was something you learned to say when you taught high school girls. Always they wept over something unknowable and it was a comfort to say you knew. It was not a lie.
She sat with her legs under her on the matching chair before the television, the two of them sitting there as before a fire, watching the newswire type and lift each line of meaningless woe.
She had sat similarly across from him in Yves workshop, while Yves and Wolfman patrolled in search of more wine years before. She was aware of her body then, curves and flats under the gauze and muggy air. She had stroked her foot as she sat there, daring the all-American boy to take her goopy husband up on his queerly nervous jokes.
"You're welcome to her, if you can tame her," Yves had said before he and the blackman left, "but do be careful, Jacques, she bites..."
Wolfman had met her eyes, sounding her to see if she had the stomach for this foolishness. Flynn had only laughed.
"No thanks," he said, "I already have one that stings, don't I, Wolfman?"
Wolfman had slowly nodded. The deal was done, the night was old, and they were about to leave her alone with Flynn for what could be hours until they found someone to sell them wine.
She had teased Flynn then, got him talking about himself. When he said he had been Prom King, he was embarrassed, and he was moreso when she had said she was his queen.
She still had breasts then and she had let them show themselves in the decolletage. She couldn't remember why Flynn hadn't gone with the two other men, but she had the vague feeling always that he stayed to protect her, and, too, that he had seen she was willing to tease.
She wasn't teasing any longer. She was only trying to get him to stop crying.
"I'm sorry," she muttered, and he waved the large handkerchief before him, acknowledging. "Do you want to tell me?" she asked.
"No," he said, and cried again.
"You cleaned me up, Flynn. It's the least I can do to clean you up too," she said. He gaped at her. She had gotten through to him.
"The Wild Geese," he said.
"What?"
He gestured toward the bottle on the lamp table next to him, Henessey's Cognac, fairly drained.
"Five Star's a product of the noble Henessey," he said. "Ran away years ago to fight for France, the Irish did. My Dad told me that..."
Emma nodded benignly, thankful for talk of any type.
Was there a point to this, she wondered.
Flynn lifted the bottle to look, the gesture was a cliche among men as far as Emma knew. The next step was to pour off the last drink in noble sadness.
Flynn did not.
"Jeez," he said. "That shit disappeared, didn't it?"
"Why are you crying?"
Flynn looked at her. "Do you know who I am?" he asked. "Really?"
"Card carrying member of your fan club," she said.
"Ha!" he laughed. "You're no Baseball Annie..."
No, she thought, but I do have a card, thanks to my darling daughter. She considered whether to show him, but decided not to. The thing was to keep him talking.
"No Annie at all, actually," she said. "Do you want to know my name?"
He waved his hand, back and fro. This meant no; this meant I don't know.
"Flynn's a French name," he said. "Originally. Peel any Irish and you find a Frog or a Dane..."
Was he remembering her? Her Yves?
"Like a hardboiled egg," she said. "The sun within a cloud..."
"What?"
"Peeling," she said. It was something Molly said.
"Someone told me once that inside a baseball is the moon," he said. "When we were kids, we'd peel them down and then milk them, you know?"
"No," she said.
"No," he said, "that was golf balls gave milk," he laughed. "Remember that. If you're ever stranded on a desert island, milk in golf balls and..." he laughed, "rabbit's in a baseball."
He laughed again. There was evidently a joke in this comment.
"Why are you crying?" she asked.
"I don't know really," he said. "Because I'm drunk, I suppose, and you were so hopeless...I mean, helpless..."
Ah, Flynn, she thought, you may be right at that. Hopeless is more like it. She nodded at the electronic campfire. The newswire said that President Carter was fishing somewhere.
Sometimes Emma longed for news of Margaret Trudeau.
"Because..." Flynn said, and he paused for a long time, more thinking to himself than for effect, "because I must consider whether there is life after baseball..."
He laughed aloud. He was slowly regaining himself.
"What is it your comedian says?" she asked. "Is there life after sex?"
Why should she play the Canadian with him, she wondered. She was as much an American as he, born by pure error in Albany, New York, and thus holding joint citizenship.
My natural homeland is the river, she thought, out off Wellesley Island where the imaginary border curves like a floating line.
Perhaps it suits me to be foreign to him, just as it suited me to be American for Yves.
Meanwhile Flynn looked anguished again.
"I'm sorry if I disappointed you..." he said.
My God, she thought, the poor boy's anguished that he didn't plank me whilst I was puking.
"I didn't mean that," she said.
He was mewing his face up again, and about to reach for the bottle of geese.
"Don't go weepy on me again, okay Flynn?"
He nodded vigorously, trying to hold it together.
"I'm a wild goose myself," he muttered. "We are dying, the Flynns..."
Oh Christ, we are all dying, Flynn. I have within me the seed of a jellyfish, a transparent little glop looking to adhere to something fresh and full of blood. Cancer never leaves you, Flynn, it just swims in the dim.
"Are you sick?" she asked, politely.
It made her laugh, the tea-time tone of her question, but then the laughing got away from her, out of control, like a line running fast from a reel, hot and crazily spinnning down to the gleaming spool. It was all so sordid, the whole affair. From dropping Molly off with the grinning Yves, and some chickie with bobbing tits moving about in the back of the shop, staring at Emma with her supercilious, kept smile; down to the trip back upstate, the lust like a hot flash at the side of the road, gulping salty Margueritas like a sorority girl intent on losing her cherry, spinning her way upstairs to sit, half naked under a bedspread by a forlorn television, her clothing vomit-stained and damp in the bathtub.
She went crazy on him and she saw him stiffen with panic. She was one weight too much for him and she saw him brace himself against her and then lose it, slowly, he weeping like a boy who had lost some bright thing.
She kept trying to swim up from it, the awful flood of loss. You are one sad woman, Emma, she thought, to burden this tanned man with your little losses.
But each time she surfaced, she fell down again. It was nearly morning after a long decade, a long night.
When she had exhausted herself, he began talking. Some of the things he said she already knew from talk or mutual acquaintances. What she did not know was how utterly bereft he was, how helpless before the loss. It had seemed to her as if he had seen a handful of bright coins fall into the water, watching helpless and fascinated as they tumbled through the dark depths beyond his grasp.
It was her fault. She had lost it herself and triggered him. He told the whole woe in a monotone, as if answering the questions of an unseen interviewer.
Brother, mother, father and friend lost, sister nearly gone; arm like a wet rag, a sopping towel, sent out into a world without the bright lights and the dazzling lime fields.
He had talked himself into a stupor, unravelling as if following her example. They were orphans in a motel dawn.
Emma had slept again, and woke in front of the dimming campfire, the television in morning glare, alone in the chair, cramped and sad and mascara-stained.
By the time she had washed out her things, he was back and surprised to see her there. He said he didn't know her; and she tried to joke him from it. He gazed upon her calmly and leaden-eyed, seemed unsurprised and unmoved when she said she was accompanying him North.
He said he didn't know her.
It was panic, she knew, no more than that. He would wake from it as if from a dream, for she would accompany him.
It wasn't amnesia, she knew and told him, just a sort of metal glitch, a blown fuse, the result of too much cognac and stress.
He had nodded complacently, looking terribly fresh for someone who had spent little of the night asleep.
He had handed her a package, a blouse and skirt in her size.
"So you remember some things," she had said.
He looked confused.
"I guess so," he had said, and then asked in a puzzled, puzzling tone. "Didn't you ask for these?"
"I would have if I thought you would have gotten them," she said.
"We'll go when you are ready," he had said.
They had gone north then, to Clayton and onward, just as now she went southward, retrieving Molly from the French fool, her father. Things would change, Emma thought. No more will I drop her there for him, I'll only go halfway. If he was so frantic to see her, he could get one of his chippies to drive up to Syracuse to pick her up.
Emma would do that much, she would go halfway. Things would change.
Molly would somehow know how to draw Flynn the rest of the way out. Things would change.
Molly had looked into the blank eye of the universe. She would guide Flynn out of the depths just as she had drawn Emma out of the endless shadows.
Emma shot southward in the rented car, thinking things would change.
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