Flight
By Karen Lewis • From Instant City Issue 4, SoMa
San Francisco, 1976, between earthquakes. An elevated artery of freeway towers over the Embarcadero, pulsing a steady stream of vehicles down into the narrow, slower heart of the city. Susanna walks, steadies her camera against the edge of a wall pasted with posters that advertise concerts she missed, consumer junk that she will never buy. A hopscotch of empty lots south-of-market, the area known as Yerba Buena, holds little hint of the convention center, museums, baseball complex, luxury condominiums yet to arrive in future decades. Susanna is drawn to the margins between decay and development, places where a wild hawk might roost on a cracked concrete wall. Near China Basin at slack tide, her lens zooms into the curved part of the hawk’s wing. It no longer appears to be a wing at all. When the print develops in a b&w blur in the darkroom’s shallow tray, spaces between feathers will be shadows. Each feather will become a variation on the theme of gray.
She loves the sense of urban solitude, being alone among thousands. She can pretend she’s not alone, that she is supposed to be somewhere. That she knows where she is supposed to be. Between earthquakes, between relationships, life viewed through a fisheye lens becomes hallucinogenic: a collage of slanted, skyscraper panoramas, where walls bend overhead in titanium waves. Other afternoons, the camera cuts rush-hour pedestrians into incognito fragments of motion, stopped. These images remind her of recent combat shots from Vietnam: helicopter wings smashing light into torn bodies and shadows.
On Wednesday, Susanna attends a gallery opening. She doesn’t find the art—which is abstract, large-scale oil painting—particularly accessible, or know the artist, who is a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend. Her recently ex-boyfriend, Alain, is conspicuously absent. She is glad. Her roommate, Gwynne—who’d cajoled her to attend the opening—soon disappears from the gallery, with an old boyfriend from prep school, probably to smoke a joint. Or to get naked and fuck, one of Gwynne’s favorite mistakes. Voices murmur and echo against the lofty ceiling of the south-of-market -warehouse. Susanna coaches herself not to feel abandoned, not to feel nervous. She imagines that she could fly away like a spotted pigeon, one among a flock, so certain of its pecking order and destiny. Original brick walls and iron trusses contrast with the vividly painted, too-large canvasses that proclaim something profound about the chemically polluted modern sky. Or is it a series of disassembled bridges?
In four weeks, Susanna will finish college; the world looms as an infinite unknown, a reflection between two gallery mirrors, where light’s odd tricks turn her into several-hundred replicas of herself. She is startled to discover one of her professors, Henry, a fleeting part of this kaleidoscope. He stands behind her, offers a glass of chilled, white wine.
“For me?” Susanna asks. “Thanks.” She takes a sip. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“The artist is a friend of my former wife. We shared a flat one summer in Amsterdam.”
Henry tries to decide whether Susanna’s eyes are amber, or green, or simply reflecting gallery lights. She is one of his most creative students, alluring in a blank canvas sort of way, a swan that has not endured many storms. The way her blouse lifts a bit to show her pelvic bone and too-smooth skin. He resists an impulse to touch her, there. He’s been lecturing at the college for five years now, and is accustomed, almost, to the array of young women who enroll in his courses. When he finally catches Susanna’s full gaze, he is unprepared for the damp fire there. Her hand trembles as she balances the goblet stem.
“Umm.” Susanna gestures at the art. “What’s it all about?”
“This show is a feminist anti-war rant.” Henry grins. He stands squarely, solidly, betraying his passion for weekend club soccer. His teeth are even, his smile wide, the laugh lines around his eyes prominent. “What do you think?”
“The war is already over.”
“That is a matter of opinion,” he replies.
“Images of dystopia, not utopia.” She alludes to Henry’s most recent seminar about literary utopias.
“Anarchy, maybe?” he asks. “How many people from the program are here?”
“None that I know of. It was hard to find a ride.”
“Lovely blouse, by the way,” he says.
Susanna takes a half step backwards, leans against the gold-rush era brickwork. “Cool thing about abstract art, it can be whatever you like.”
Henry half-turns to let someone push by them; he waves to a person across the room. “There’s someone upstairs I need to see. Department business. I’ll be right back.” He eases his way through the crowd. Susanna feels relieved, in an abandoned but I’ll survive sort of way.
It’s not the wine, she realizes, but something invisible, an aftershock from nearby redevelopment’s wrecking ball, or a prequel to the next quake. Despite gossip among her girlfriends in the history department, she’s never—before this moment—considered Henry overly attractive. In class, he reveals a certain mental charisma, but now Susanna feels the particular kindness of his smile. She’s not used to compliments. Henry’s confidence is refreshing, in stark contrast to Alain, who could never, ever decide: the library, or the café; tea, or coffee; wine, or beer; Susanna, or Theresa.
The gallery whirls with the acrid, rooty fumes of foreign cigarettes, Indonesian cloves, Gitanes, Gauloisies, traces of Humboldt weed. Obscuring the more honest scent of turpentine, oil paint, brick, rust, and dust.
Susanna drifts outdoors, lingering at the unsigned entrance to the gallery. Her roommate Gwynne’s expert advice echoes: You’re on the rebound, vulnerable. Don’t fall so hard, next time. The alleyway outside the gallery reeks of dumpster offal, stale urine, broken beer bottles.
Susanna daydreams of Alain, who is pressing her for reconciliation. If you count phone calls every night at ten pressing. More like, obsessing. She does not want Alain to be sad. But she is certain she cannot inhabit a foggy despair in order to make him content. She will not move to Boston when he attends grad school. She will move to Los Angeles, for the architecture program. If she’s accepted. But is this really what she wants? She is ready for a grown up affair, with someone who knows what they want in a woman. Not that she feels like a woman. More like a half-fledged, wild bird.
Jackhammers slash the corner pavement into fragments, impossible to reassemble. Someone once carved names there, in wet concrete, thinking love would last forever. If the road crew digs deeper, they will discover traces of gold dust, shards of obsidian, Oholone abalone beads, tufts of fur, fossilized footprints from bear, coyote, extinct amphibians.
Susanna shivers. Percussive footsteps, a breath. She turns. Henry stands very near. His eyes twinkle, the color of coconut shell. Later, she’ll remember his eyes as the dregs-of-coffee color. Sweet, but merely the grounds. His cologne is subtle, evergreens mixed with citrus. Sexy.
“You look lost in thought,” he says.
“I needed some fresh air.”
“Not much of that, here. I am going uptown to pick up a book. Susanna—want to come?”
Following a long pause, Henry adds, “It’s not far.”
“Okay, sure.”
They catch the 30 Muni, uptown, disembark near Union Square and walk a few blocks. He opens a door, escorts her inside. The bookstore holds the essence of leather, paper, ink, antiquity. She’s underdressed, in jeans and an ivory silk blouse, bought last summer from a street vendor in Berkeley. Henry is on first-name basis with the owner.
Shelves rise up each wall of the bookstore, floor to ceiling. Some have glass doors, brass locks. A display case runs the length of the room. Henry leans casually against the case. His tweed jacket is gray, like fog, mixed with fallen leaves. Gray like the first few filaments of age above his temples. One leather-knotted button on his cuff clicks against the countertop.
The men chat about mutual acquaintances. How is so and so? What did you think of that volume on such and such? Oh, yes, that other translation is fascinating, but have you read the earlier, pre-war version? Susanna has difficulty following their language, a mixture of old-boy academia with an eastern, ivy-tower patois. The precise, classical concerto tones of the elderly proprietor’s voice buffet the jazzy, bass-guitar riff of the younger professor.
Susanna stares into the glass display case, astonished for 1/500 of a second by the reflection of herself next to Henry. It is a collage of two people drawn suddenly close.
Beneath the glass, a volume of California history lies open to a navigator’s map of the coastline. The coastline is rendered in exquisite ink, with each rock and shoal noted—calligraphy that once charted the difference between life and death. Drake’s Bay, New Albion, San Nicolas Island, Punta Arena. There is no grid of the city, no Mission Street, no Sutter Street, no road or trail of any kind.
Henry tries to include Susanna in the conversation, but she is silent, reading. He is of two minds: ask her to dinner, or not. He does the math, she’s only twenty. Too young. And he is old enough to know better. On the other hand, his long time love is away on business for three weeks. He’s curious about Susanna, what she wants from life, how she plans to satisfy her desires, what she looks like with her clothes off, what ideas hide behind her wide, green eyes.
Henry purchases one of the rare books. His hand brushes the back of Susanna’s arm. Waves ripple through her, like grains of sand forming contours of a desert, or falling through a pirate’s hourglass.
Susanna does the math: Henry is at least a dozen, probably fifteen years older—closer to her parents’ generation than to hers. She’s lonely, on a runaway, roller-coaster rebound. Grieving with a sickening, vacant-lot melancholy, tempered by binges of ingesting tasty yet ultimately unsatisfying mind-altering substances. Susanna’s mother, at age twenty, had been already happily married, and pregnant. And happy. And married. Susanna’s ambitions are wider, taller: to design skyscrapers, perfect, peaceful urban villages, space colonies.
They walk the eight or ten or twelve or twenty blocks back to the gallery, because it is rush hour and the busses are overcrowded. Henry’s hand rests casually on her waist, his arm wing-like, guiding her down this street, criss-crossing through stalled vehicular traffic, then around a corner. He explains nuances of city history, points out details of a window, a roofline, a view that she never noticed before. She wonders whether or not there is a Big Official Rule against student / teacher liaisons. She surrenders to being led, protected.
Henry’s car is behind the gallery.
“Would you like a lift home?”
“No, thanks. My roommate is probably waiting here, somewhere.”
“How about dinner?’
A taxi blares its horn at that moment, and she pretends not to hear.
Susanna spends the following week on campus, yet avoiding the department office. Technically, she is no longer enrolled in any of Henry’s classes, just working off an incomplete from last semester’s utopia seminar. She finds peace and quiet in the basement of the main library. Her paper is now officially two months overdue. She needs the credit to graduate. Graduation is three weeks away. She feels an irrational surge of nostalgia for the predictable, tender, friendship offered by Alain. She can’t date anyone else, she isn’t ready, she will never be ready, she will pledge as a nun at the Zen center.
At home, she half-waits for the phone to ring. When Henry calls the first time, she’s not there. Gwynne takes the message and reports, “He has a kind voice.”
“Umm. Yeah, he does.”
“You should go for it. You can’t just weep and mope about Alain forever,” Gwynne advises.
The next day, Susanna answers the phone.
“Will you be coming to the city tomorrow?” Henry asks. He knows there is a field trip scheduled for her public policy class.
“Not sure.”
“The planning commission hearing is at 10. We could have lunch afterwards.”
“I don’t know. I have to take a ton of photos, for a project.”
“Yerba Buena, the demolitions?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure how long it will take me.”
“I could drive you around. If you want.”
Susanna agrees, not sure what she’s agreeing to.
The hearing lasts less than an hour. The planning commission rubber-stamps another demolition order. Residents of the old hotel have been protesting for months against eviction. Blocks and blocks of historic buildings and transient hotels close to the financial district have been targeted for clearing, in order to banish low-income elderly, the addicted, and the confused.
“We are witnesses to history, as it crumbles,” Henry says. He parks and holds open her door. They’re at the edge of a neighborhood that still blooms in the shadow of financial district towers. Some buildings may survive, if their historic context can be well enough documented. Henry doesn’t seem to be in any hurry, so Susanna takes photos from many angles.
“There must be some way to preserve this place,” she says.
“Too many people think that poverty can be erased by a wrecking ball. By constructing new buildings,” he says. “It’s all about power. Who holds it. How they, or we, use it.”
“Do you really think one person can make any difference? Against the entire system?”
“I’d like to hope so.” Henry admires Susanna’s untainted idealism. That’s one reason why he teaches. He remembers, in a hazy way his own days as an undergrad, questing, protesting. Burning draft cards. Blockading induction centers. That was before his oldest brother came home from Vietnam in a body bag. Too little, too late. What did he learn? Make love, not war. Make love. This is what he wants. No strings, no promises, no tomorrows.
Henry and Susanna sit outdoors, at a restaurant at the end of a long, rickety pier, not far from where she photographed the hawk. The bay floods in at high tide. Nature is still visible, and beautiful. They order lunch.
“When did you move to the city?” she asks.
“About ten years ago. The summer of love, 1967. We were just married; the marriage didn’t last, but I stayed. How about you?”
Susanna bites her lip. A seagull screeches overhead. Two seagulls. She does not admit that she was barely twelve the summer of love—a flower child in training, playing jump rope on suburban Los Angeles asphalt.
“A couple years ago. It was one of those perfect, sun saturated Saturdays. We walked everywhere, got lost, uphill, downhill. I never wanted to leave.”
“This city holds a certain …enchantment.” Henry leans across the table and traces the outline of her hand.
Gulls are flapping and fighting on the pier beneath their table, begging for crusts of bread.
“I’m scared to feed them. It reminds me of that film, The Birds,” Susanna says. She moves her hands to her lap, wraps her thin wool sweater closer.
“Maybe we should go.”
She offers to pay her part of the check. He says, next time. A steel drawbridge lifts, while safety lights blink and alarms clang to stop car traffic. A wooden yacht motors in to berth. Waves sway the pier they’re on.
“Susanna—if the world ends tomorrow, how would you spend today?” Henry asks.
“I never really thought about it. Everyone is asking: what’s your five year plan, your ten year plan? I have no clue.”
He leans closer. “Is there really any time, except now?”
“The eternal now, like Ram Dass.”
“The one and only. His lectures, when I was in grad school—challenged the status quo.”
“Do you honestly believe it’s possible to function in this society, and on the spiritual plane, at the same time?” Susanna asks.
“I think it’s possible to try. America is a great cultural and political experiment. We’re free—to a certain extent—to live our own lives according to any desires we might hold. Spirituality, quests to India, psychedelics, free love—freedom of choice is part of the experiment.”
“If we are here, now—then why?” she asks.
“Why not?”
“I’ve been so obsessed about the future, I can’t cope,” she says.
“Like, with finishing overdue papers, final projects, late night parties, darkroom deadlines, boyfriend issues, grad school—“
“Enough! The paper is done. It’s in your box. I left it yesterday.”
“I look forward to reading it, Susanna. What you’re going through is normal. Everyone expects you to have a bright future.”
“Etcetera. I’m sick of the ivory tower world. But what world do I belong to?”
“You’ll figure it out.” He smiles. “I sent those letters of recommendation off.”
“Thank you. What if I get accepted?”
“Then you’ll have to make some choices.”
Henry’s intoxicating, deeply coffee eyes catch her gaze full on. She grins back.
“Yeah.”
“What do you really want to do with your life, Susanna?” he asks.
“No! You’re not allowed to ask that. It’s like a test, and it’s not fair, because your life is totally together, and you know the answers—”
“The test is life, and there are no right answers, and nobody’s life is totally together. Especially mine.”
“You’re not supposed to say that.”
“Why not?”
Susanna shrugs. Her hair, usually braided, is windblown; so that amber strands veil her face, tangle her silver earrings. She’s twisted her paper napkin into shreds.
“Do you think you’ll stay here forever?” she asks.
“In San Francisco? Or ivory tower world, as you call it?”
“Either.”
“Probably. I love this city. The synergy, the unpredictable tides that pull people together at any given moment.”
The double, triple, zillion nuances of his words linger like the last swallow of cool, clear German wine. He reaches for her right hand, and this time she lets him hold her, gently, intently. As if he were a fortune teller, a comforting older brother, or merely a spinner of sweet lies.
Susanna knows it’s a mistake, but she goes with Henry to his flat. Actually, it’s a house, pre-earthquake, in an area of town that’s rundown, racially mixed, overlooked by developers, alive with echoes of decades-earlier dockworker strikes, children playing, sobbing, laughing. An electric-yellow, plastic bag whips over the tops of parked cars, kite-like in a dance beyond gravity. Graffiti stenciled onto the corner store’s stucco wall pleads End Apartheid in South Africa. Beneath, barely visible, except that Henry points it out, a faded green peace sign. A torn flyer for Grateful Dead at the Fillmore flutters in the wind, next to a lost dog notice.
The interior of Henry’s house is all polished wood. A bay window spans the full width of the living room, creating a sanctuary of natural light. Stacks of books lean against walls, overflow shelves. His desk is like a nest, in the corner. She recognizes part of last semester’s reading list on the coffee table: Kerouac’s On the Road, a paperback copy of Ecotopia, and Plato’s Republic. Gary Snyder’s poetry.
“I always wondered, why didn’t a woman write the Republic?” she asks. “Where were all the women philosophers?”
“Good question.”
“If women were in charge, there would be more parks, gardens, universal health care, daycare. Plenty of murals. No weapons. No wars. Cities—would be totally different.”
“Good topic for a graduate thesis.”
On the wall, there’s a photo of Henry with a beautiful blonde woman, and Susanna doesn’t voice her question. X-wife, girlfriend, another student from previous years, his sister? Susanna recognizes one of Imogen Cunningham’s photos. Unmade Bed. In this print, white sheets are crumpled into a landscape of hills, shadowy arroyos, waves of white, with cottony wrinkles from when a person or people had been in the bed. Suggestions of nudity, femininity, with three tortoiseshell hairpins left on the sheets. She wonders for half-of-a-thousandth-of-a-second, whether his sheets are white, like these in the photo, and whether she will ever know.
“What kind of music do you like?” he asks.
“Nothing too heavy metal.”
“Dylan?”
“Cool. I love his harmonica.”
Henry caresses Susanna’s waist, turns her slowly, closer.
“Did anyone ever tell you that your eyes are the color of butterflies?”
“Not exactly.”
“Blue, green…beauty,” he says.
Nobody else searches Susanna’s eyes this way, not even her mom, or her dad the night she’d nearly died of fever, or Alain, her first, and just about only, lover.
Echoes of a chant: make love, not war, reverberate through every alleyway, every treetop, every communal house in the bay area. Anything is possible, groovy and far out.
Susanna’s feeling vertigo, with each touch of his fingers, lips.
Henry pauses to roll a joint of sinsemilla from a friend’s ranch up north.
“Want some?”
“I better not. I’m already pretty out there.”
“Yeah. You’re right.” He drops the joint into a carved wooden box on the table.
Henry knows exactly where. To touch her. His fluency with a whispered, erotic vocabulary—breast, taste, need, skin—renders her silent. Susanna wants to be guided along the topography of Henry, to the places of delight and danger, the scars. She craves to touch his pulses, intersections between skin and consciousness. She is trapped, in a stop-action zoetrope reel of emotions: desire, courage, terror, bliss.
“Do you have any water?” she asks.
He brings two glasses. She savors a sliver of ice that cools her tongue, teeth, lips.
There are so many ways this fable might end. Henry cannot think past tonight. Annemarie is away for two more weeks. Susanna is here, and listens raptly to his stories of Woodstock and Boston, and the garage band he once opened at the Fillmore with. For Henry, each woman is a new neighborhood, with hidden gardens, debris, graffiti, murals, the scent of azalea or sea breeze. His desire is a steady thirst, rarely quenched.
While Henry selects a bottle of wine and opens it, pours it, Susanna gazes out the bay window and knows, in a deeply intuitive way, that she should leave. The danger here is that she wants too much. If she were Gwynne—instead of herself—with Henry in the sweet, spring twilight of his living room, each would simply take what they might from the other, sweat and skin, laughter and regrets. For Gwynne, love seemed to exist as an unfinished experiment, occasionally with two men, or else with a boy still in high school, a stolen afternoon with her female tennis coach. Hitchhiking, drunk on the train to Venice, once raped, twice pregnant. But Susanna is not like Gwynne. She suddenly gets this.
Night falls over corridors of asphalt, walls, billboards, the curve of the 280 in the distance. Henry lights candles.
Before either fully undresses, they say, in synch, “I don’t think we should be doing this.” Another moment of shared mind, laughter. Silence. In the distance, the Southern Pacific commuter train sounds a long, lonesome whistle.
“I need to leave,” she says.
“You’re right. And—I so want you to stay.”
“I want to. But I can’t.” Susanna searches for her shoes, which she’d slipped off earlier. A pair of shoes hides under the kitchen table: black, dressy heels with thin straps, lots of straps, like tango shoes, about her size, but definitely not hers.
Susanna accepts his offer of a ride to the train station.
“Why don’t I just drive you all the way home?”
She declines, doesn’t want Henry to see her place, or meet her housemates. At the train station, they linger.
“I’d be—uncomfortable. If anyone found out about this,” she says.
“Don’t worry,” he promises. He helps her out, holds her close. “I’m glad that we spent this afternoon together.”
“Yeah, me too.” How bizarre, she thinks, to find this delicate power—like adjusting a negative the moment before you decide on the boundary for a crop. He had someone else’s shoes there, she will confide to Gwynne.
As the railway wheels roll along the tracks, It doesn’t matter, I should have stayed rattles through her head. Abandoned warehouses, neighborhoods, barbed-wire barricades flash by; this view reminds her of turning a salamander over, so that its tender belly is revealed.
Later that week, sitting crowded together with students and faculty in a departmental meeting, Henry hands Susanna one of her silver earrings, wordlessly, at the same moment that he passes back her term paper. She slips the earring into her pocket, unseen.
In June, Susanna declines grad school, accepts a job in the city, moves to a communal house in the lower Haight. She and Henry will see each other often, but never alone, always lost in a foggy infatuation. One night, late October, Susanna climbs to the top of Ashbury. A place where hawks sometimes soar and crickets dance. Below, the city pulses with kinetic, neon energy, thousands of lovers and strangers, tons of steel, pavement, glass. Shadows and light. Surfaces and hearts. She knows, truly, that somewhere—in the city below, or within another city, or maybe on a bus, or descending a forest trail—someone is waiting for her.
Tomorrow, she will fly to Barcelona, on a one-way ticket, because it is time to move on, to migrate. She feels it. The damp air carries traces of sage, dust, and salt. A westerly breeze caresses her bare arms and neck. The wind also contains echoes of Henry’s voice: if the world ends tomorrow, how would you spend today?
