Free Some Things About Flying by Joan Barfoot Page B

it isn’t a matter of fault, but I’m tired, my mother’s dead, I have no more room for generosity, or even understanding, and I’m done.”
    â€œWith us?” He still wasn’t getting it. “With me?”
    â€œYou sound astonished.”
    â€œBut no warning? That’s not fair. To come out of the blue, springing this on me.”
    â€œOh, Geoff, there’s been plenty of warning. You just haven’t heard it.” He had many virtues, not all of them public ones: energy, focus, desire, intensity. And love, he said. But he had also been deaf, it turned out.
    â€œLila, be reasonable! I thought you were better than that. This is what I went through with my wife, for god’s sake. I never expected to go through it with you.” His finest shot, a comparison with the odious, frivolous, uncomprehending wife.
    At least Tom has never done that. Rather the reverse, in fact, and just as upsetting.
    â€œI’ve done the best I could,” Geoff said, and no doubt from his perspective he had. He looked as if he wanted to shake her, or strike her. Had he ever hit his long-gone wife with those ham fists?
    He is still giving speeches and doing good work. She still reads his name in the papers, his story continues. Just over a year later—a pleasant, unstrenuous period Lila spent mainly teaching, reading, researching, and playing with Patsy and Nell, going to movies and plays and bars, telling secrets and sorrows and jokes—she met Tom, another good man with much of his attention elsewhere.
    These percentages and decimals and tiny increments of love are hard to calculate. Hard, as in both difficult and wrenching. Lila has certainly had much delight from the ways words wander off in different directions.
    How do some people stick in one life when even a word can have so many existences? Lila expects that, absorbed in stories of various real and fictional sorts, she has fallen easily into the idea of alteration and flux: that a multiplicity of characters in a multiplicity of situations must have a multiplicity of responses.
    That makes today especially unpredictable and volatile. Except for Tom, these are strangers, and at that, who knows about him? Or herself? There’s no real telling what the two of them contain, never mind anyone else.
    How long has she managed to avoid pictures of what’s happening and how they are doing? It feels like forever. If it’s even been quite a while, that must be a good, hopeful sign. But it may be a matter of seconds. The mind flies in a crisis. Is time flying?
    Is the plane? Well, she does have to laugh.
    And again that offends Tom, although she can’t see why, it’s not aimed at him. “Lila!” His voice slices through the buzzing and din. His fingers, shockingly, burn on her face. “Stop it! You mustn’t.”
    She stares at him, surprised not by pain, but because she never dreamed Tom had it in him to strike her. One way or another, sometimes deliberately, generally not, he has now and then caused her grief, but she has never had a moment of fear he would turn on her that way. Stupid, surely, to start now. How could he imagine frightening her, or punishing her? What does he suppose he could do?
    â€œI’m sorry, Lila, but we have to keep our heads.” What on earth for, when they may lose everything else? She keeps that tiny joke inside.
    What’s wrong with her? Because he’s right, this is awful, not funny. “What’s the matter with you?” he asks, and it’s a very good question, as well as an amazingly stupid one.
    â€œI’m just not very good at reality, I guess.” It’s hard to keep her eyes from dancing. Her grandmother used to say, telling Aunt June some event, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
    Lila is tempted to tell him, “Really, it’s one of my gifts, not facing facts very well, and aren’t you lucky.” Nobody good