Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Read online

  “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

  Lila sat and looked over the water. A line of rocks broke the surface of the Mad, stranding the river like a comb. Lila would do for Thanksgiving what she always did, a dinner at Kennedy’s with a mixture of friends, most of whom stopped by on their way somewhere else. “Friends,” Lila said.

  “I’m going to my parents.’”

  “Lucky you. My parents are dead.” What had she been lacking all these years? How had she not recognized it? An uto sitting on a park bench, yearning for home. She realized Michelle was gazing at her. An up-and-comer; a youngie with a future; someone who could help her out. “Okay,” Lila said, turning toward her, “you can have our water. I’ll cover for you with the commissioners.”

  “That’s great.” Michelle seemed suddenly flustered. “That’s wonderful.” She was nodding. “I’ll talk to my boss about some tit for tat.” She suddenly blushed, the red spot on her nose flaring. “I mean, quid pro quo.”

  Lila stared open-mouthed at Michelle.

  So long since she’d done a seduction. She was almost frightened to attempt it.

  But then she was doing it. “Tit for tat is good,” Lila said earnestly, the ferocity of her old stirrings a surprise. She looked at Michelle’s face; the youngie was blushing so fervently Lila had no hesitancy in moving on. Soft, wet words; words like a probing tongue. “I mean, tit is always good, and tat can be delicious.” To a good girl like Michelle, Lila realized, Lila was the bad girl who thought sexy thoughts, who shrugged at Michelle’s horror over the Gridians.

  Michelle seemed to have stopped breathing. Lila laid her left arm on the bench behind her. She stroked the wondrous coat. “You think your boss would let you give me some tit for tat?”

  “I don’t know,” Michelle breathed, “oh, I don’t know.” They kissed. “But I have a boyfriend!” Michelle cried.

  Lila felt like she was caught up in a whirlpool, twirling down. This is like a rape, she thought. I’m using her. But it felt so good that Lila didn’t care.

  “HAVE YOU PICKED a name?” Chad asked. Derk was back, sitting at Chad and Sharis’s big blue table. He hadn’t visited for months, since he’d lost his job when the plant closed and his parents insisted he sell his car. Sharis was at the counter chopping. They had thirty-six pumpkins, and Sharis was consumed with making use of every one. Derk’s girlfriend was pregnant.

  “Enola Gay,” Derk said.

  Chad started. “Where’d you get that name?”

  “We just thought of it. Don’t you think it’s pretty?”

  “Unusual,” Sharis said. “Cheerful.”

  Chad’s colleague Prem taught the world wars. Chad would have to check Derk’s records to see if he’d taken that course. “Enola Gay was the name of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,” Chad said. “You can’t name a child Enola Gay.”

  “Chad!” Sharis objected. “Nobody remembers! Derk was a history minor, and even he doesn’t remember.”

  “What do your parents think?”

  “They like it. They might not have liked the name Gay twenty years ago, but so long as queers stay queers, it’s fine.”

  “It’s a terrible name.” Chad’s shoulders slumped; his very cells seemed to be sagging. “What’s your next daughter’s name going to be? Holocaustia? Stalinette?”

  Derk and Sharis stared at him with their bold, affronted faces.

  “DID YOU FINISH the basement pantry?” Allyssa asked.

  “It is finished,” Tuuro said.

  “I don’t know what else you’re going to do. I thought this place was clean before you got here.” Allyssa tapped the kitchen table with her fingernails. She was, Tuuro thought, remarkably beige. Even her lips and nails were that color. “I wish I could send you into the village. You must hate this waiting.”

  Tuuro had awakened weeks before in a double bed in an upstairs room, under flowered sheets and a pink waffle blanket. The last thing he remembered was a car door being opened, and being pushed inside. A shot of Calmadol, maybe. When Tuuro awoke it was daytime, but the shades were drawn. He crept out of bed and peeked outside, the earth around him so vast and brown he felt like an ant in the center of a sandbox.

  He knew where he was. What he didn’t know was why.

  The bedroom door had opened, and the beige woman had walked in. “Hello, Mr. Simpkins,” she said, extending her hand. “Glad you’ve awakened.” She strode to the window and released the shade. “Have you figured out where you are?”

  Tuuro nodded.

  The beige woman smiled and spoke slowly, as if she were announcing a great prize. “There’s someone close to us who wants to see you. Have you heard of General Nenonene?”

  SHARIS SAT IN her groundcover planting bulbs. For the last three years she’d sprinkled daffodils and tulips through the groundcover in the side and back of their house, and every spring the yard was prettier. She could bury the daffodil bulbs herself, because squirrels didn’t like them, but the tulips had to go in about a foot deep, which required Chad and his shovel. “How many holes do you want?” he’d said, and asked her where to put them. He was more accommodating, really, than he’d ever been, which made Sharis feel a surge of love for him. Ridiculous to lust after Lars, a man three thousand miles away who didn’t even speak her language. She had a feeling he swore: the translation module had been developed by missionaries and was quite prim, and there seemed to be words missing.

  The bulbs had been deeply discounted. Sharis bought over two hundred. “Act of faith,” the clerk said as she rang them up, her tone not admiring but sardonic. There were other gardeners shopping. One woman pulled a wagon heaped with amaryllis bulbs. “Indoor forcing!” she said. “Won’t they be beautiful at Christmas?”

  “Mommy?” Leon asked. “How can a squirrel go straight up a tree without falling off?” He was dropping the bulbs into the holes, after Howard had put in the bone meal and water and stirred up the soil.

  “I don’t know, honey, that’s just what squirrels do.”

  “But how?”

  “Leon,” Howard said, “how do people walk on two legs without falling over? A squirrel can’t do that, can he? Squirrels probably think we’re amazing.”

  “Doesn’t Howard have a good point, Leon?” Sharis asked. She was quick to praise Howard these days. Howard’s teacher seemed to have abdicated from teaching almost totally; Howard said that most days his class sat and watched films on their own percs. Spelling lists? Sharis would ask. Reading assignments? Homework? No, no, no.

  “And think about this, boys,” Sharis said. “We’re putting this lump in the ground that’s going to be a beautiful flower in the spring. Isn’t that amazing? It’s an everyday miracle.”

  “If we’re alive in the spring,” Howard said.

  “Howard, you’re a big stupid fuckface!” Leon shouted.

  “I would never have said that word in front of my parents,” Sharis scolded, still reeling from Howard’s comment. “Never.” Bad language was a little weed; obsession with death was a big one. But she didn’t have the strength to yank at the big weed now. “You know who’s really stupid?” Sharis’s voice rose. “The people who don’t rake their leaves! I hate them. They are the stupidest people on earth.” Hacking at the weed of fear instead of trying to pull it out.

  “Like the Hofmeisters?” Howard asked, making Sharis grin.

  “Like the Hofmeisters.” Sharis threw a handful of dirt over a bulb.

  “And the Perrettis?”

  The Perrettis hadn’t been around for weeks, and they’d left tomatoes rotting on their vines. “I hate the Perrettis.”

  “I do, too!” Leon said, jumping up and down. “I hate them!”

  “You little animal,” Sharis said. Leon was a continual relief to her. His wiriness, his spikiness, his lack of concern about others: he seemed to be geared to survival.

  She and Chad had raked and then mowed all their immediate neighbors’ yards, piling the leaves on the edge of the
street, where the leaf-sucking truck—just like every year—had come and taken them away. See? Life went on. All over Dayton there were yards thick with leaves and fallen limbs, footballs weathering and deflating, lawn chairs blown into hedges and spiderwebs on railings and doorframes. All over Dayton. But not here. From the air their neighborhood would look normal, the best place in town to come home to.

  NOTHING EARTHSHAKING. STEADY forward progress. Open minds.

  “So what do you think?” Chad said. “You think they came back to Dayton at the end of 1903, after they’d made man’s first powered flight, and their hometown had a tickertape parade?”

  A shy collusion of half-smiles and looks, with the braver students shaking their heads no.

  “No!” Chad said. “A thousand times, no! First off, tickertape parades weren’t invented until the twenties, and they’re a New York City phenomenon, because the tickertapes were stock market byproducts, and second, no one even realized what the Wright brothers had done. Even the article in the Dayton paper was confusing, because the writer thought that what the brothers had done was a variant of hot-air ballooning.”

  In the fall of 1902, the glider worked almost perfectly at Kitty Hawk, except for an occasional tailspin. Orville suggested making their machine’s fixed rear rudder movable, like a ship’s rudder. Wilbur thought of linking the rear rudder’s movement to the wing warp controls. It worked. They had lift, they had control—the only thing they needed was propulsion. Over the next year they designed and built a propeller and an engine. Neither task was easy. Books in the Dayton Public Library were not particularly helpful. Imagine, one of the brothers said, the propeller as a wing traveling in a spiral course. This was a useful idea, and by June they had two propellers. The design and production of the engine they farmed out to Charlie Taylor, their mechanic and bicycle shop helper.

  The first Wright Flyer, as it came to be named, was never fully assembled in Dayton. The bicycle shop couldn’t hold it. The central portion of the machine blocked the passage between the front and back rooms of the shop. To wait on their bicycle customers the brothers had go out the shop’s back door and come in from the front.

  The brothers shipped the pieces of their 1903 contraption to Kitty Hawk in September. The weather that year was terrible, windy and rainy. It took three weeks to put their craft together, in a hangar they had built the year before. Once the thing was constructed, they played with it as a glider. A much-heralded rival flying machine, the Aerodrome, the creation of the head of the Smithsonian, started and ended its inaugural flight by sliding into the Potomac River. To protect their craft from such a fate, the Wrights added landing skids to it. They mounted its engine. A propeller shaft was broken, and a friend of the Wrights took it back to Dayton to Charlie Taylor for repair. Charlie fixed it, but upon its return to Kitty Hawk the shaft broke again. This time Orville himself took the propeller back to Dayton, returning with steel shafts December 11.

  “This story holds no suspense for you, does it?” Chad asked his students. “You know how it will end. Guess what: Wilbur and Orville did, too.” On December 16, two days before the fifty-nine-second flight that is in all the history books, the flight that would introduce the modern era of air travel, Orville cabled his father. “Success assured,” he told him. “Keep quiet.”

  The Wright brothers came back home to Dayton. Beyond their family and few trusted friends, no one knew what they had done, and no one would know for almost five years.

  Between 1903 and 1908 Wilbur and Orville made hundreds of flights at Huffman’s Prairie, an area just northeast of Dayton. This prairie would later become an airport (Wright Field) and then an air force base (Wright-Patterson AFB: the uplifting and the pragmatic aspects of Dayton combined in its name). The Wright brothers picked this area to test their crafts for practical reasons: it was a flat area with good winds, and it was at the end of a tram line. Mr. Huffman let them use his land for free, asking only that they not disturb his cows. Over that prairie Wilbur and Orville figured out how to fly in circles, how to take off without wind or elevation, how not to stall.

  In August 1908, the brothers at last went public. Wilbur spent two minutes aloft over a field in France, observed by a crowd of airman wannabes. Orville, outside Washington in September, performed for government officials and stayed in the air sixty-two minutes. Men wept, and this was not a weepy time. Imagine, people said—the royalty and the commoners, the scientists and the daredevils, all the thousands of people who flocked to see their flights—two bicycle builders from Dayton, Ohio.

  “As if they were handy fellows,” Chad said. “As if they were”—he nodded at the classroom door—“a couple of Mr. Jenkses.” (Mr. Jenks was the building custodian; this line was guaranteed a laugh.) “Do you think that pretending that the Wrights were simply bike builders helped make their achievement palatable? Like taking to the air was a big cake you could cut up and pass around the world? Think of those brothers. They were daring, they were wildly inventive, they were careful, they were afflicted. Listen to me”—and here Chad got emotional: his voice cracked and his eyes filled every time—“those brothers were extraordinary. Those brothers were not like any mechanics you or I will ever know. And this city supported them. Orville was standoffish, people used to say. Wilbur had his head in the clouds. Then someone else would laugh and say Oh yes, Wilbur did have his head in the clouds! I submit to you that that is typical Dayton: a gloss of disapproval overlying a wall of tolerance. That’s not true everywhere, folks. Dayton was a good hiding place for them. Dayton let them experiment, crash, rebuild; it ignored them until the world said not to; it let them be unknown. Think of the gift those brothers gave the world: not only did they show man how to fly, they made it look easy.”

  waiting for winter

  PREM LEFT. PREM had a sick cousin, suddenly, back in Cambodia, and before the dean had reassigned his classes, Prem was gone. He left his glasses in the drawer of his desk, photos of his daughters hanging on the wall. He rolled up his degrees and piled their disassembled frames on the floor. Seventy-five years before, his mother at age sixteen had fled the Khmer Rouge, the address and telephone number of a cousin in America hidden inside a Bic pen. When she arrived in Ohio in December, she thought all the bare trees were dead. Terrible country, she thought. Within three years she was back in Cambodia. She married and had children, Prem among them. Prem had come to the U.S. for graduate studies—his expertise was the world wars—and stayed when he got the UD job. Chad couldn’t remember if he’d been a U.S. citizen.

  Chad stood at the door of Prem’s office, taking in the disarray, unable to walk in. “I’m not really blaming him,” the department secretary, KayLynn, said, “but it makes me furious, you know? How’re we supposed to keep going if everyone leaves?” She waved at the frames on the floor. “He could have left it neat!”

  “I’ll take them,” Chad said suddenly. Wood, paper, posterboard: these could be fuel. Prem’s whole desk, come to think of it, could turned into fuel. “Why don’t you leave?” Chad asked KayLynn, because as a single woman she easily could.

  Her eyes widened. “This is my home.” Chad knew KayLynn’s house, a battered frame two-story flanked by frat houses, where she had lived all her forty years. “What about you?” KayLynn asked Chad. “You’ve got your kids and all.”

  “I don’t know,” Chad said. It struck him he had never been less sure. He’d had a naive view, he could see, that history would swirl through them yet leave them curiously untouched, like a house swept off its foundation and deposited intact downstream. Their house might just as well be crushed. Prem was a supremely practical man; his leaving was a statement. He didn’t care for himself, Prem had said once, but war was tough on families.

  “What’s going to happen?” KayLynn wailed suddenly. “I’m here with a bunch of historians: can’t you tell me what’s going to happen?” The light through Prem’s old window drove her back into the hall. “Ramsey’ll stay,” KayLynn said, shaking out the plackets of h
er sweater as if she were straightening her mind, “just out of stubbornness, and Montford doesn’t have anywhere to go. I figure if you’re not going the next one will be Hanning.” Lisa Hanning, the medievalist, had a young child. KayLynn frowned. “We’ve got a pool, you know. Johnny Riley in student housing started it. Name the date Frost resigns.” Frost was the university president.

  “He won’t resign. He’ll leave. Run the university from his place in Tallahassee.”

  KayLynn snorted. “We’re lucky if there’s a third of the student body here.”

  “My Nixon seminar is down to two students.”

  “Montford had to cancel Luther and the Reformation.”

  “Catholic school,” Chad observed.

  KayLynn leaned against the wall and laughed. “You’re incorrigible, you know that? Incorrigible.” Chad smiled happily down at her, wishing that Sharis thought that he was witty.

  MICHELLE WAS ASLEEP beside her, vertebrae curled like a winding staircase, late-afternoon light made golden by the autumn leaves. It should be beautiful, it should be plenty, but sex wasn’t like it used to be for Lila. It no longer pressed her with its old ferocity, and Michelle’s enthusiasm—her screams, her moans, her digging her separated fingers into Lila’s scalp—seemed oddly pointless and self-centered. Lila used all her tricks on her, and Michelle responded, so vigorously Lila heard herself thinking, more than once: Did I ever act like that? And then she felt a distance from her own past, maybe her own body, because her lovemaking in the past had involved almost no thought, and certainly no judgment.

  It wasn’t rape, not really, Lila thought. More like prostituting herself for the chance of the Grid.

  In the meantime, her customer was smitten. “I won’t need a boyfriend if I have you.” Within days there were ten, twelve daily messages on Lila’s perc, one of them showing Michelle lying on a sofa naked, moving her hand over herself and singing, “How Do I Feel?”

  What’s wrong with me? Lila thought as she garbaged the images. She was using this young woman to get at something obviously crazy. Lila wanted to be a different person, to normalize herself and her desires, turn her yearning back towards a woman the way lesbians a hundred years ago—for the sake of family peace, propriety, children—had tried to fix their yearnings on a man. But she couldn’t do it.