Free Mysteries of Motion by Hortense Calisher

Our—managers.”
    “Sure are.” Texas professors, born in Russia some of them, but already with barbecue manners and Hollywood haircuts, both sexes of them. East coast think-tankers, fragile as prep-school geniuses, whose hound-dog heads one wanted to scratch between the ears for encouragement, until one saw the wild, monkish eyes. “My apartment co-op, the tenants never really believed they were their own landlord. We’re our managers. And—though that bunch may not know it yet—they’re us.” Even Perdue. He’s us too. And doesn’t know it yet.
    She hums mockingly, one of the tunes which had purled at them yesterday all through lunch. “Tom. You’re taking all this so—” She touches his wrist. “I know you always do—who better than me? But this trip—can’t you understand that for a lot of us, it’s only flying. Don’t overload it with—” She sighs.
    “Significance. Sorry to be a bore, but I never talk like this with anyone else.”
    She smiles. He sees that he does. “Okay, then. Let’s go eat.”
    They both burst out laughing. They’ve had their last meal. Until embarkation it’ll be all liquids, rarefied but adequate.
    “What’s in those pep drops, Tom? I can feel the vitamins dance. Bee jelly and ox blood?”
    “And powdered unicorn horn? Doubt it. Merck’s best formula for aerospace.”
    “Anyway, I’m not hungry. Feel as if I never will be. You?”
    “No. On a slight jag, though.” He’s just realized it. “The potassium crazies.”
    “And I don’t pee much. You?”
    “No.”
    Their voices die between them.
    “Last words,” he says. How strange it’s all going to be, citizens. No account may ever give all of it.
    Her eyes dart from side to side. Does she think of Peenemünde, the old site of the German military park, placed there because rocketeer Wernher von Braun’s father had once gone duck hunting in a remote town, and the son had remembered—from which, doing her last article for The Sheet, she’d flown on here? Or of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology—JP of GALCIT for short, where she’d been before? Or of what she’s going to wear for the flight? Which is the same as for him. He checks his watch—his old Waltham from the island, which he’s sending home. Past midnight. Once they get inside, they won’t again be allowed out. Strange, that not more of us are wandering.
    “May I offer you my arm?”
    She takes it, in style.
    “And my love.” Just in case. It’s wise to say.
    “And mine. Remember.”
    “I shall.”
    They swing their joined arms and start up the path, between the double rows of palms. From these, a man emerges on their right, pacing head down, one arm behind him across the small of his back.
    It’s a European posture, Gilpin thinks in that first impression which takes precedence over all. Actors walk so, playing unworldly persons or famous ones, Stanislavsky method. Or it’s in the striped suit, out of place for the tropics. Or that iron-gray, maestro hair.
    The man steps to the center of the path, silently presenting himself. That is his posture.
    His face. What must it have been, if it’s ordinary now? Elongated by youth, would it have been an El Greco? Squared by middle age, it’s no longer a face from those high winds, but one can see that it’s been there—and hasn’t yet settled for handsomeness. Perhaps the extraordinary has since gone into the whole man, who now bows as if they have merely met on the path, and goes on past. Yet he had intercepted them.
    They watch him enter the motel. He walks determinedly, the one arm still folded behind his back.
    She doesn’t speak. My life’s never been weighted like that, Gilpin thinks. By another person. I love by accretion, finding that no disgrace. But I’ve no background for joining in the dramas which fall upon those who’ve loved otherwise; I lack the proper conventions. I speak from the off-side.