The Four Corners of the Sky Page 9

  In the women’s bathroom, where Annie was trying to wash off her maid of honor’s face and hair, Georgette kept insisting that Brad had put the make on her two summers ago when he’d run into her at the Atlanta airport.

  “You wish,” retorted the disbelieving Annie. “Georgette, keep your damn head down.” She bent her friend over the sink.

  Georgette threw up again and passed out.

  She wasn’t the only one. Daddy Alton, who’d had too many mai tais for his oxygen to handle, sang “The High and the Mighty” with Sam and then accused his wife of sleeping with their yardman, a Georgia Tech senior, and then he too passed out. Mama Spring screamed, “He’s dead! Is there is a doctor in this godforsaken dump?!”

  The owner of Hôm Qua Restaurant stepped out of the shadows and raised his hand. Clark acknowledged the man with a wave, then leaned over and pulled up Daddy Alton’s eyelids. “He’s fine.”

  At 2 a.m., D. K. Destin grabbed Brad by the hair and threatened to kill him if he ever hurt Annie.

  Mama Spring threatened to kill D. K. if he threatened to kill her son.

  “Let’s all say good morning,” Clark proposed. “Then nobody will have to kill anybody.” Turning, he bowed to the physician-restaurateur, who stood patiently by the door with his car keys in his hand. “Cám o’n rat nhieu. Ban that tot. Tam Biet.”

  The owner bowed. “Vinh biet.”

  Clark laughed.

  Annie told Sam, “This is the worst wedding I’ve ever been to. And it had to be mine.” She burst into tears.

  “Come on, everybody,” Clark said. “Let’s look on the bright side.”

  “Oh shut up, Clark,” Sam said, hugging Annie who was hugging Teddy. Malpy barked. “What did that Vietnamese man say that was so funny?”

  “I said good night for now and he replied, ‘Good-bye forever.’ Sort of how they felt in Vietnam in general.”

  ***

  A month later, Annie and Brad were deployed to the Gulf, where their air wing distinguished itself in Operation Desert Fox, a strike campaign from Kuwait against Iraqi forces. Annie and Brad flew F/A-18 Super Hornets off the aircraft carrier Enterprise in four separate successful bombing raids, for which they each received a minor medal. Both enjoyed what they were doing.

  During the two-year tenure of the young couple’s marriage, Mrs. Hopper never (“thank you, g.d. Jesus”) laid eyes on Sam and Clark, Georgette and D. K. again, nor on Jack Peregrine once. But she continued to ask Annie with a careful innocence about “the father of the bride” whenever they spoke, which was too often for Annie.

  Nevertheless, as Sam remarked to Clark and Georgette when, a few months after the wedding, they sat at Pilgrim’s Rest, looking through the wedding photos, it was as if Brad’s mother could never recover from Jack’s absence, as if she had always imagined him some rumpled grumpy Spencer Tracy, who should have been grousing in his armchair about losing the teenaged Elizabeth Taylor to a younger man and having to pay for it, whereas Annie’s father had failed even to show up, proving himself, Sam had to admit, no Spencer Tracy.

  Clark passed around a snapshot of Mrs. Hopper taken at that tempestuous banquet in the Vietnamese restaurant. He noted dryly that Mama Spring was no Spring Mama either. Indeed, she might be more accurately called “Mama Late Summer. Or even Mama Nearly Autumn.” Nevertheless, Mama Spring had been dressed for Annie and Brad’s wedding as if she’d expected to pick up Keanu Reeves at a salsa bar later that night.

  Georgette added—in the wry voice that Sam and Clark had always appreciated far more than her own mother ever had—maybe Mama Spring had been dressed up for that Georgia Tech senior Daddy Alton had accused her of sleeping with. Maybe that undergraduate had been waiting for her next door at the Marriott. Maybe Georgette had slept with him too. She put her hands over her eyes. “Oh God, don’t make me remember that night. I think I did sleep with a friend of Brad’s that night. It was the worst night of my life.”

  “You don’t know that yet,” Clark pointed out.

  Sam sighed. “You think Annie will be happy with Brad?”

  “No,” promptly answered Clark.

  “It’s so easy to be negative.”

  As it turned out, negativity was the better bet.

  ***

  After their tour in Kuwait, Annie and Brad returned to the San Diego base where Lt. Commander Wirsh’s wife Melody had time on her hands and decided to spend it having sex with her husband’s best friend. Annie caught them at it and left him. The news came as no surprise to her family in Emerald.

  Georgette, now a psychiatry intern at Chapel Hill, explained it all.

  Annie had married Brad because she’d wanted to best Mrs. Hopper.

  Annie had married Brad because he had none of her father’s quicksilver tempo, which she’d taken to mean that he would be like Clark, steadfast and trustworthy.

  Annie had married Brad because he’d outflown her in three speed test competitions.

  Interrupting this analysis, Annie asked her friend, “How about, I married Brad because I made a stupid mistake?”

  “That too,” agreed Georgette.

  When Annie phoned Mrs. Hopper to congratulate her on the separation—“You win”—Brad’s mother pretended not to know what she meant and offered sincere hopes that the young couple would reconcile someday because a marriage between a man and a woman was a sacred sacrament—

  “Oh, shut the fuck up.” Annie slapped her phone shut.

  Over the next few months, Brad confessed eagerly to anyone who would listen that “maybe” he’d done wrong by getting caught sleeping with his buddy Steve Wirsh’s wife.

  He phoned Georgette to ask her to tell Annie he could do better.

  “You can’t do better until you stop being scared of Annie because you’re scared of your mother.”

  “Think so?” Brad loved to hear theories about himself, although he never assimilated them.

  “Afraid” seemed at first an odd adjective for Georgette to apply to such a daredevil as Brad. After all, he would fly a plane in the worst weather with a kind of reckless glee. But interior weather did frighten him. Annie could scare him with a scream. “I don’t want to talk about it,” was his white flag.

  The night Annie had flown home to California after a flight test at Ali Al Saleem and had found him naked in their bedroom on top of Melody Wirsh, he’d retreated without a struggle. “Aw, shit, this sucks,” was all he could think of to say. Annie could think of a lot of things but said none of them. She knew that if she opened her mouth, she would not be able to stop weeping.

  On the night she left him, the wildness of her hair (a long unruly tangle) so exasperated her that when she saw herself in the mirror at the motel to which she’d driven in an exhausted rage of tears, she’d cut off her curls to her scalp and thrown the hair in the wastebasket along with her wedding ring.

  “I hate him,” she told the mirror.

  The Navy agreed to transfer her to Annapolis, far from the California desert where Brad and she had danced in jets together, and to give her an assignment teaching at the Academy. She cried from time to time as she drove across the country in the Porsche. On the seat beside her, the gray Persian cat Amy Johnson ignored these emotional displays and licked a paw.

  ***

  In Annie’s condominium in Chesapeake Cove, on the top floor of a building called Harbor Lights, there was only room for herself and her cat. A few weeks after she settled there, she saw a young man, pleasant-looking in Brooks Brothers khakis, in the hall with a white dog, a West Highland terrier. The next night, the young man rang her apartment bell to ask if she were okay, explaining that he’d heard crying coming through her door. He pointed at his dog, who was furiously wagging his tail and tugging against the leash to leap on her. “My Westie, Elliot Ness. I’m Trevor Smithwall, 7C.”

  Annie apologized, promising with her appealing smile that she would try to keep her sobbing down after eleven. When the Westie spotted the cat, he broke free, chasing Amy Johnson into t
he living room where he got himself clawed on the nose. Carefully Annie lured the dog from under a chair and handed him to her neighbor. “Would you keep holding him,” Trevor asked, “while I go get his eye drops?”

  “I can do that,” she agreed. “I’m Annie Goode; I’m at the naval base.”

  “Figured.” Trevor pointed at her white uniform, then at his ID, which was hanging from his blazer pocket. “FBI.”

  “Figured.”

  Over that first hard year for Annie, Trevor became a good friend. One night they even made a feint at sex but quit before they got there, accepting that they weren’t attracted to each other. Relieved, they began to see one another almost daily, sometimes for dinner, when they would talk over problems at work, how both wanted to move faster up the ladders of their careers, how both worried about falling off the ladders, or being pushed.

  Annie was not much of a consumer (preferring to build a retirement fund for the rainy day that would inevitably come) but the few things she did buy were of the best quality, like her entertainment system. Trevor preferred to spend his money on fine wines and restaurants. So there were many occasions, late at night, when he would knock on Annie’s door, holding out a bottle of Montrachet and a DVD and they’d sit together watching a classic film on Annie’s large state-of-the-art flat-screen. Or they would play poker. Annie almost always won. She’d played poker since she was four years old. They both looked forward to their evenings although they told each other they should be out dating instead.

  “This is awful,” Annie told Georgette on the phone after one of her evenings with Trevor. “I could end up like Sam and Clark.”

  “Well, you could end up like Sam or Clark but unless you were really schizophrenic—”

  “You know what I mean. Why is it only in chick flicks that good friends fall in love? In real life, we keep falling in love with people like Trevor’s ex-girlfriend—”

  “You’re in love with Trevor’s ex-girlfriend?”

  “People like Brad! People that, if we were totally honest, we didn’t even really like!”

  Georgette argued that there was something sort of appealing about Brad, so Annie should forgive herself for making such a stupid mistake.

  “I’ll forgive myself the day I sign our divorce papers.”

  “And when will that day be, Annie?”

  “Why do you keep asking me? Because you want to marry him? Remember when you threw up at my wedding?”

  “Obviously you do,” grumbled Georgette.

  “Well, you were onto something when you puked. You had the right idea.”

  Georgette agreed that she often did.

  ***

  At Pilgrim’s Rest, Annie idly tapped her birthday balloons while waiting for Georgette’s voice mail. “Call me,” she said. “My dad’s dying.”

  She glanced at the storm clouds through the hall window when her cell phone rang. “Georgette?”

  But it was Brad again. “A? I’m a little delayed here in Charleston; air traffic gets so freaked. I’ll be there in a couple of hours. Got you a great present.”

  “Brad, don’t give me a present. I’m divorcing you.”

  “For better for worse.”

  “You should have spelled out how ‘for worse’ would be me seeing you screwing Melody Wirsh.”

  “That’s gross.”

  To Annie’s relief, she found this remark so bizarre that she laughed.

  Brad sighed at her unfairness in referring to that ancient “misunderstanding.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll make it up to you, A. I’m on my way.”

  “Don’t bother—” But he’d hung up.

  “Maybe,” said Annie aloud, “Brad ought to try slowing down.”

  Standing silently in the hallway, eating a saucy chicken wing, Clark nodded at her. “Good. Now you’re getting nowhere.”

  Chapter 12

  Make Me a Star

  Only two weeks after leaving Brad, Annie was teaching her first squadron of Navy pilots how to land fighter jets on the decks of pitching aircraft carriers so that the tailhooks would stop their planes from rolling into the sea. She knew she was good at her job. But she worried she was a failure at love. As she lamented to Georgette, she had a fatal weakness for loving men who couldn’t stay true to her. “If it’s fatal, get over it,” advised her friend, sitting beside her on the porch at Pilgrim’s Rest. “Here, I’ll write you a prescription.”

  Annie studied the script. “This is for sunblock.”

  “Right. You need to get out more. Get on a ship and go to South America.”

  Annie said that she got on a ship every morning.

  Georgette grabbed Annie’s knee to stop her from pushing the swing faster. “A cruise ship. You need a relaxing cruise ship. I’m thinking like what’s her face? In that movie Sam loves?”

  “Bette Davis, Now, Voyager?”

  “Yeah. You need more facials and salsa contests and less landing Super Hornets on an aircraft carrier. Not that life-and-death’s not a blast too.”

  Annie decided to see a therapist. She found the wrong one in Annapolis. Her analysis lasted only one session, which the therapist spent accusing her of trying to overthrow male authority. “You make me sound like the French Revolution,” she retorted. The therapist kept tossing chocolate-coated coffee beans in his mouth as he suggested that anger at her husband was actually fear of the phallus. Annie said no, it was actually anger at her husband. He suggested that she appeared to be sitting on great reserves of anger; it seemed likely that her father, her “uncle,” or her Lesbian aunt, or some combination, had abused her and she’d completely repressed the knowledge. Annie said that such a supposition was unchallengeable but bogus. Her father’s only abuse had been leaving her alone. Sam and Clark’s only abuse had been their rarely doing the same.

  As she strode out of the therapist’s office, Annie said she wouldn’t be back. One hundred and forty dollars an hour was too much to pay to watch somebody eat candy.

  “I do it for the caffeine,” he said.

  “It’s too much to pay to watch someone eat a pound of caffeine.”

  But alone later with Amy Johnson, in her neat, spare apartment, Annie found herself so upset that she called Georgette at one in the morning. “Be my friend and my therapist both? We could do it officially on the phone. I’ll pay you by the hour.”

  “At one in the morning? Not on your salary.”

  “This fat jerk said I had a fear of men.”

  Georgette laughed. Men, she said, were the least of Annie’s fears. What scared Annie was losing rank, not being in charge.

  Annie asked: But had she left Brad to forestall his leaving her?

  “Possibly.” Georgette thought it just as likely that Annie had left Brad because she’d found him in their bed banging the Implant Slut with the ridiculous name of Melody.

  “Good answer,” said Annie.

  “A good answer is the answer you want,” Georgette said. “Am I going to confuse friendship with therapy and tell my best friend she has repressed her pathological dread of abandonment by leaving her husband but not divorcing him, which frees her from the threat of intimacy with another man? That a reaction formation to male irresponsibility has produced in her a pattern of obsessive-compulsive over-achievement within a sexist patriarchal hierarchy like the U.S. Navy where she is addicted to a steady supply of high grades, top prizes, and speed records? So, yes, she does want to overcome and supersede men. But she also wants to overcome and supersede women. She is an equal opportunity superseder. And she has a serious eating disorder. Am I going to say any of that, even when she wakes me up at one in the morning? How many best friends have I got?”

  Annie asked, “What serious eating disorder?”

  Georgette made a spluttering phht phht noise. “You say the collapse of your marriage was devastating and yet you never huddled in a fetal position for days, or went on a binge of sex with strangers, or faced the look on the checkout woman’s face when you
rolled six gallons of ripple ice cream onto the conveyer belt. Did you? Did you ever gain, or for that matter lose, a fucking pound?”

  Annie assured her friend that she was a mess and she was getting a divorce.

  “You haven’t even formally filed. Why is this divorce so slow and messy when you’re so fast and in charge?”

  “Okay, Georgette, are we going to talk ‘messy’? You’ve still got boxes of unsent Christmas cards on your dining room table and it’s March!”

  “Aha, this is why friends can’t do therapy on friends. My patients haven’t seen my table, much less my closet.”

  “You haven’t seen your closet yourself, not in years. You couldn’t.”

  “You can trash my closet all you want and you still won’t be divorced.”

  Annie assured Georgette that the latest delay on the final proceedings (she was legally separated, don’t forget) had to do only with lawyers stalling to pad their bills; she would be finished with her marriage to Brad by the end of next week. “By Bastille Day, Gigi, je serai en liberté.” She then changed the subject. “I want you to meet my neighbor Trevor. For his last vacation, he went on a dig to Baalbek.”

  “What does Trevor think about how long your divorce is taking?”

  “Nothing. Nothing!”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  Nevertheless, the next morning, a bleak March weekend, Annie, off-duty, drove all the way from Annapolis to Emerald in order to keep on arguing with Georgette about why she wasn’t divorced yet.

  As soon as Sam had seen her niece driving up River Hill Road in her gray convertible, she’d telephoned Brad, whom she knew to be in Atlanta, visiting his mother. He flew straight to Emerald the next day to try to “smooth things over” with his estranged wife.

  Annie refused to see him, although she did hide with her old dog Teddy at the top of the stairs, listening in on her husband’s lament to his aunt-in-law. Sam spotted Annie crouched there on the second-floor landing, head pressed between the rails, just as she’d done when she was a child, with the black-and-white little Shih Tzu on her lap. Her eyes were squeezed shut in the same way too, and seeing the young woman, Sam’s heart ached for the child.