On the Cape the Bay side is a miracle of beach and parks, Provincetown some miles away, the lighthouse rising on a spit of land, a blunt-topped Magic Marker thrusting from the sea.

Here was this day.  Unbroken blue above.  The sun, a vivid Aztec plaque from a museum case.  The breeze, as though fat-cheeked Zephyr on an antique map were blowing it, a little chill perhaps, there in the parking lot, sand urging itself fine into a graceful drift against the hedge.

Since his accident a month ago she drove.  Not that anyone was hurt, just minor damage to the car, the nuisance of insurance forms.  And yet his judgment seemed to have deserted him.  A one car accident.  Was it his age?  His reflexes slowed down?  There was no view, no phrase, to take away the curse of it, the error, the stupidity, although he tried at first but settled finally into a sullen stance that said, "I'll simply never drive again except around the block or to the A&P.  Longer distances are yours."  Angry at himself.  Embarrassment.
 

Published in Talking River Review, 5/97
 
 
 

She didn't mind.  Not even though with all vacation driving in her hands she had a busman's holiday.  A hundred miles a day was her commute.  This trip was a thousand miles in all or more.  She took it with good grace, pleased secretly that when they drove together she'd be in control and they'd be safe.  He drove too fast.  Probably he always had.  She was certain it was that, not age that caused the accident.  How could she think of him as old?  She always thought of him as powerful.

"Hey Liz.  Give me a hand with this.  Can't manage it," he called from the back of the car.

Always a fine line between mothering him and being there.  She'd been about to take the toiletries, the kites, but left them on the cushion, going back to help.  She carried herself with a certain elegance, not quite six feet, no longer lithe, and yet athletic-looking with her broad shoulders, free stride.  Water was her playground of choice.  The thousand meter where she still could race the clock.

She never wore a bra in summer.  Although her pastel yellow blouse was not see-through, the trompe l'oeil could have fooled a passer-by.  "I thought you'd stopped this macho silliness," she said, in a tone she'd discovered when they'd met five years ago.  Not nagging.  Not peremptory.  Not Mary Poppins.  Her wide-spaced blue eyes twinkled but reminded him.  She snatched the hamper from the trunk as though she was working barbells in a gym.  "You get the stuff from the back seat, Rudi.  I'll schlep this.  I really proved myself in China, didn't I?  Pack mule de luxe?"

"I always fed you lumps of sugar to encourage you," he said, grinning amiably, making light of his continuing attempts to lift which they'd discussed so many times, "and never whipped you once."

"That's only cause you knew I'd beat you up."

"I'll get the kites.  We'll commandeer that table over there.  The gods are truly smiling down on us to send us such a day.  We must be doing something right.  Maybe we can find a way to bottle it."  He lifted his round face to the sun, ingesting it, which seemed to make his white beard glow, his heavy thatch of white hair shine aloud as though it were a sound, perhaps acknowledgement.

He slogged his way to the table through the loose sand, heavy going, as the kites, no longer quite inanimate, struggled to be free, tried to wrest themselves from his arms, the one from China dragon-shaped, the other emblazoned with a huge white star on black, bought in Mozambique on their honeymoon two years ago.

At the empty table he weighted the kites down with rocks and sat facing inland, his back to the sun, watching Liz approach, lugging their hamper, her breasts in motion as she swaggered in the sand.  That Sixties' hippie stuff was so much part of her, touching, ludicrous.  Her breasts must have been marvels once.  Heart-breaking fly-awayers in that bourgeois revolution time when the style of everything got changed.  The century had sagged as so much else.

She hefted the hamper to the tabletop.  It was a splendid thing, English deco doodads on the corners, bought that first summer together, in their British phase, travelling north as far as Inverness and Nairn for the salmon fishing, as far south as Penzance where retired pirates owned the tourist traps.  She unlatched the wicker box.

She set the napkins out, their weighted corners keeping them in place.  Her slightest motions brought pleasure to his eyes as they did now.  And then a thought, a cloud, moved in.  Quite soon his money would be gone.  What would they do?  Begin to sell things off?  Her salary paid basics, yes, their mortgages, her mother's care.  His Social Security, now fully taxed, helped out, as did his dividends.  But his principal, the core, a lifetime publishing, was going fast.  Where had he read you never live off principal or if you do, you're damned?  They had and were.  Lucky thing she was the star she was, an acquisitions editor of finest quality.

She took the wine bottle from its zinc-lined inner box and offered it to him as usual.  As usual he pressed it to his face, against his beard, savoring the cold of it, then read the label, a California chardonnay, nodded approval and handed it back to her, cork first.

Their trip to China'd cost too much.  They shouldn't have.  But so did living where they were cost too much, a pair of tickets to the Met, this small domestic jaunt.  Besides, she'd never been.  He'd wanted to be there when first she saw Guangjhou.  He never could count beans.

The wind had calmed.  She laid the silver out and then the Rosenthal plates with their red and blue flowers, the crystal glasses filled halfway with wine for weight in case the wind should rise with force.  And then the gravlax, San Andrè, the thin-sliced onion rye, Lavosch, the roasted peppers and the cornichons, olives, lemons cut in halves.  Graceful as a woodlands creature, he thought.  Following their ritual he watched while she set up.  When she was done he rose, portly, solid, tall, took her in a bear hug, kissed her as he might have swigged from a canister of water at a oued, his hands pressing her body to him, naked underneath the cloth.  He raised his hands to cup her face, draw her even closer if he could.  His tongue touched hers.  She let him go reluctantly.  They raised their glasses in a silent toast.

The thought was lightning fast even as he took his sip - his Tiffany lamp, small as it was, was worth.  The serpentine china closet?  The paintings?  No.  He couldn't part with them.  Not yet.  Not art.  What would that gaming table fetch?  Things - when it came to that of course he'd sell.  He couldn't be a burden.  Not to her, although she'd never say.

"Rudi," she looked at him quizzically, swallowing a bite, "is it really true you've never flown a kite?  Every kid has flown a kite."

"Not this kid," he said, his mind on Minton plates, Steuben, but smiling once more at the day, at her, laying gravlax on his slice of rye topped with a smear of San Andre, taking a bit of it.

"I thought you'd done everything on earth, Rudi.  No kites?  Tales of a misspent youth?"  She put her right hand on his.  "Somewhere in the Bronx there must have been a park.  Didn't your parents take you there?  Not even Sunday afternoons?"

He lifted his heavy head again to let the sun shine on it full, eyes half-closed.  He pursed his lips.  "There was no time.  My parents spent their Sundays hating everything.  It was an all-day job.  Themselves.  Each other.  Their hopelessness.  Our chinch-infested flat.  Some kids flew kites, I guess, or pigeons like Brando did in Waterfront.  Must have been Gentile.  I didn't know those kids.  Few found the way to fly away from there."

She rose impulsively, came around behind him and pulled his white-haired head against her breasts.  She rubbed his beard as if he was a cat, kissed his forehead, tilting it back.  She returned to her side of the table.  "It's hard for me to visualize you powerless.  Struggling to get free.  I see you only as a kind of jolly green giant, publishing a Noah's Ark of geniuses whom no one else would touch.  When you talk about your life as a kid I'm always moved to tears.  It's as though you need protection now, right now, and there's no one else around but me."

"Don't need protection, Liz.  Just love.  You bring me love.  You are my Moet of the soul.  And that's enough."

"Come on Rudi.  You'll have me weeping in my wine."  She smiled although her blue eyes looked damp.  Teeth white against her tan.  "A salty chardonnay's no good."

He reached out, took her hands and kissed the palms.  "I need protection only from myself, my hubris, my own impetuosities.  My warped perspective.  The shortest answer is it's true.  I've never flown a kite.  Can't wait to try.  The sky is filled with them - look there and there and hundreds all the way to Provincetown.  I want to join my kite to theirs.  The wonder is the bow in every line as though flying one is effortless and you are unencumbered as the kite you fly."

"It takes a firm hand, Rudi.  Don't be fooled.  The kite fights back like good-sized trout.  Come, we'll pack up all our cares and woes.  Tu as bien diner?"  He nodded.  "You've waited all your life till now.  With me."  She placed her index finger in her mouth and wetted it, lifted her arm above her head, finger extended.  "The breeze is picking up.  Another grape or two?  A peach?  Or shall we start?"  He nodded, grinning, telling her with his eyes he knew the secret of the ties that bound them close, the common language that they spoke that linked them in the here and now.

A wind arose, kicking up dust devils in the parking lot.  White sails, bellying with wind, raced from the land.  Elizabeth's hair was lifted from her shoulders and her blouse puffed out as though it resented being tied, restrained.  They stowed away the remains of lunch, the silverware.  "Big moment here," she said.  "Forget the Wright Brothers.  Historic launching coming up."

"Don't rag me, Liz."  He stood, took the Mozambiquan kite in his hands.  "You'll have to start me off."

"OK.  We hook it up like so.  Watch me hook mine.  As I take my run I'll have my kite over my head, prepared to take the wind.  My string is in my other hand, ready to play out.  Here goes."  She loped away, left hand holding up the kite, the dragon streaming out its tail behind.  And then soared up.

She stopped, tanned face yearning toward the kite, playing out the string.  She back-tracked and was soon beside him, kite above to join the others in the sky.

"Doesn't look too difficult," he said.

"Go get 'em, tiger."  She put the ball of string in his left hand, the kite crossbars in his right and kissed him fleetingly.  "For luck," she said.  "Don't panic if it dives.  They'll do that sometimes, as though heaven can wait cause earth is all they know."

It was a run of sorts, not nearly fast as she.  It was fine irony to be heavy, snowy-haired, and yet remembering an oval track, the wind against his face.  He felt the tug, and then the kite was lifted from his fingers, plucked aloft, and he could stop.

He was completely out of breath, his face suffused, his fingers gently trembling.  The white star rose above him as he let out line, the kite tugging at his hand as if it would be free.  Still winded, shaken, he back-tracked slowly, keeping tension on the string.  He kissed her, then sat down, quite bushed.  "I haven't run in years," he said, "unused to it."

She didn't like the way he huffed and puffed.  Should she have thought of that?  It was a kite, not sacks of coal.  She made a quick judgment.  Expressed concern would be inappropriate.  "The rest of it is sedentary if you wish," she said.  "The kite will be just fine.  You got it up there.  Now it's on its own."

He let the string spool out of his hand slowly, exhilarated and yet oddly frightened at this depletion of his breath.  "Come on," he counselled himself, conscious that he might be alarming Liz.  "You haven't run a marathon.  You didn't even have a proper jog.  No perspiration, man.  You played four-wall handball until six years ago."  He calmed himself although his fingers couldn't seem to stop their slight tremor, gentle as a pulse, a beat not even definite as sucking butterflies.  His kite was soon beside hers in the sky, just as below they nestled to each other, pulling on their strings to steady, catch the wind.

At last the trembling stopped.  His breath no longer labored hard.  He smiled.  He was flying his kite.  They looked at each other.  See, everything is fine.  She let her blonde head rest on his shoulder.

In minutes he was bored.  He had expected more.  Perhaps because he'd never flown a kite before.  And yet what more had he supposed there'd be?  Imagination was the only thing that flew untrammelled, writing, art.  As for the rest - earth-bound.  Not disappointing.  Fact.

His mind flew back to them, to facts, to objects he possessed.  There were a lot of them, although more of things had never served as raison d'etre.  What more could there have been?  He'd had a plenitude.  A cornucopia.  Complaints, regrets, were heard from could have beens, wanted to's.  He had been.  Was.

Secure in their side-by-sideness his breath was now returned.  He flew his kite, joined with the others in the blue.  He fancied all the kites up there as lost souls rising, seeking entry to a higher plane, yet chained, deterred by uncut strings to earth.  For all the fact that they were airborne they were anchored as was he to daylight savings time, to pull of moon and heat of sun, to wind velocity, control that lay outside one's quiddity, thingness.

He let his string play out to the very end so that only a foot or two remained on the spool, white star on black gently dipping, gliding this way or that in the current or in response to some vagrant thermal, kite receding somewhat in the summer sky.  It spoke to him, it reassured him he was there, controlling it.  Sending messages along the twine.

"You like it?"  Liz smiled at him.

He returned her smile. "You want a simple answer or a complicated one?"

"About a kite?  Stay loose, Rudi.  Loose.  There's nothing here to prove.  No prophetic statements, metaphors."

"I'm all it has, Liz.  This tight string.  How can I possibly be loose about a subject of such gravity?"

"OK, wise-ass.  Watch the tag end of that line.  If it takes off on you you'll never see ol' star of Mozambique again."

He wound it up a turn or two, the tug of it substantial now.  It strained to fly away.

"I'm getting chilled, Rudi.  Can you manage both for just a minute or so?  I'll go back to the car and get my sweater."

He nodded and she put her spindle in his left hand.  And shambled toward the parking lot through the sand.

The kites tugged at the spools, urging him to follow them.  He was Bellerophon, careening in his wondrous chariot across the sky, controller of the universe, outstripping time.

When the wind came up it was his wrists that felt the tension first and then his shoulders.  Damn.  Struggling salmon didn't fight this hard.  It was ridiculous.  His arms were being pulled from their sockets!  Two kites?  He couldn't just let go!  And tell Liz what?  That he couldn't keep rein on a pair of kites?  He clenched his teeth and held on tight.

The blow to his right arm made him cry aloud.  He felt as though the wrath of God had seized his flesh, his bones, wrist to shoulder blade.  The screw of the Inquisitor bit in.  A wrecking ball had struck, a lightning bolt.  It was impossible to bear.  He whimpered, gasping as he held on tight.  No, no!  A kite!?  He weighed two hundred pounds.  Nothing had defeated him, not chance or his own fuck you stance or private yes and no or choices that he'd had to make.  The robot fingertips of pain sunk in.  A tear coursed down.  He clung to both the kites.

He saw her make the turn to take the path.  She'd put the sweater on.  He could hold out.  He'd never tell her what had just occurred.  He plastered on a smile as if it was his last.