Marian was run through by deep envy. She envied him Ruth, and she envied him Greenland. She remembered the etchings of icebergs and whaling ships in her father’s books.
“Once,” she said, “I flew north from Barrow, at the very top of Alaska, out over the pack ice. I almost couldn’t make myself turn back. There was something…” She trailed off. She didn’t know what she wanted to say.
“Mesmerizing,” he said. “I found the blankness mesmerizing.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what it was.”
“Marian always pushes too far,” said Ruth. “She can’t help herself. Anyway, all that ice sounds awful to me. There aren’t even any people there.”
“There are some around the edges,” Eddie said. “Must be hardy folk.”
“No people is part of the appeal,” said Marian.
Eddie lifted his glass. “To no people.”
Leaving the restaurant, they plunged into the blackout as though dropping into an underwater cave. Piccadilly deprived the eye but crowded the other senses. Bodies pushed from all around. Soldiers and women hooted and laughed, wheeling past like bats.
To Marian, tethered to Ruth by the hand, the noise and movement and hilarity seemed like another form of stillness, of waiting. They were all waiting. For the liquor to kick in. For a kiss or a touch. For dawn. For sleep. For duty to resume. For the war to go on, to end, if it ever would. For what would happen to happen.
Eddie steered them through a door and a dark velvet membrane of blackout curtains into a humid bubble of life. Massed uniforms shifted and bobbed on a dance floor like a raft of kelp on a swell, dappled with colored lights. Under the smoke the air had a sweet-and-sour funk, like the people themselves were fermenting. Onstage, horns glinted, violins dipped and parried, a singer knit his brow and clutched the microphone as though the song were being dragged out of him by an unseen claw. They went up to the balcony. Eddie was describing the view from his navigator’s desk, out a bomber’s Plexiglas nose. “Sometimes it’s like a rose window in a cathedral,” he shouted over the band as they slid into a banquette, “and sometimes it’s a portal into hell.”
A roundel of sky and cloud, puffs of flak bursting from nothing, like black popcorn. Hundreds of bombers in formation, planes transforming into masses of smoke and flames. Sometimes one would fall, burning, onto another. It got so cold in the planes their skin stuck to the instruments. They wore so many layers of clothes and gear they were big as boulders. Water passed below, thin beaches or marshy coast, then the geometry of human life: fields, roads, roofs. Onto these things they dropped bombs. There were real eggs for breakfast rather than powdered ones on days they flew.
Ruth, between them on the curved banquette, lolled against Marian’s shoulder. Why, Marian wondered, did Ruth not lean against Eddie instead? A few times on winter days she had gone with Caleb and Jamie to the hot springs near Missoula, and the sensation of being submerged in warmth while her cheeks burned with cold and her eyes teared from wind was not unlike how she felt now, most of her basking in the pleasure of Ruth’s closeness while her extremities remained exposed to Eddie’s frigid band of sky.
“Enough,” Eddie said, interrupting himself. “Marian, I’ve been wondering—how’d you get it in your head to fly?”
“I just wanted to. That’s how it is for most everyone, isn’t it?”
“There must have been something.”
“The barnstormers,” Ruth prodded her.
“Yes,” she said, reluctant, “I did meet some barnstormers when I was a kid.”
“The same day Lindbergh flew the Atlantic,” Ruth said. “Destiny.” She signaled a waitress for another round.
“Then what?” Eddie said.
Ordinarily this was a question Marian would dodge. The facts of her life seemed too strange to tell, too steeped in shame and consequence, and she wasn’t sure she could adequately explain herself. But for once she didn’t want to retreat or evade. In the midst of a war, her secrets were inconsequential.
She said, “Even as a kid, I knew I needed to make money to be a pilot, so I cut my hair off and dressed as a boy so I’d get hired to do odd jobs.”
“Were people fooled?”
“Some were. Some people never look closely at all, at anything. And I think some preferred not to look too closely. Also, it wasn’t so unusual in Montana for people to live on the fringes.”
She told them about collecting bottles, about driving for Mr. Stanley, about Wallace and his drinking and gambling. “Then a man came along who offered to pay for flying lessons.”