“Trout says you’ve got to practice spins so you know how to get out of them,” she tells Barclay. “He says a pilot needs to learn not to panic. He says your reactions get faster.”
She knows what she is doing, what she is asking for, what will happen. In a few weeks, she arrives at the airfield and there beside the Travel Air is a brand-new bright yellow Stearman biplane. Trout’s smile hangs between his ears like a ragged hammock, but while they walk around the plane to admire its gleaming sleekness, the dashing set of its wings, he says in an undertone, “You sure about this, kid?”
She is beginning to understand how Wallace built his debts. Just this one last thing, she tells herself. Then she will be ready to start flying across the line, paying down her debt. “At least this way I’ll learn some stunts,” she tells Trout.
Trout sits in the front cockpit and Marian behind, both in helmets and goggles and parachutes, harnessed in over the shoulders. The Stearman has a stick instead of a wheel, and at first she’s awkward with it. （“From the elbow, not the shoulder or you’ll pull at an angle,” Trout said on the ground. “You have to learn the feel of it.” The great unifying thesis of his instruction.） She likes the way the open cockpit fits snugly around her, how her legs extend out to meet the rudder pedals. She likes her face in the wind.
Their third time up, the stick jerks in her hand—Trout signaling he wants to take over. He climbs high, starts a dive. As Trixie Brayfogle had, he pulls up into a loop, but this time Marian is not watching the tumbling sky and ground. She watches the gauges. They level out again. Without turning to look at her, Trout raises both hands to tell her she is back in control. He’d already talked her through it: the necessary altitude and airspeed, the RPMs, the limits of all these things, the lightness and slowness she would feel at the top, the dive back toward the earth. “A loop is just another turn,” Trout says. “Only it’s flipped up on its side.”
She climbs, begins her dive.
* * *
—
“I flew a loop,” she tells Jamie on the sleeping porch. “Three, actually.” Her heart races as though she were confessing a secret, though she won’t tell him how she had gone to see Barclay afterward, how, when he opened the door, she had grasped him around the neck and kissed him.
A heavy pause, then, grudgingly, Jamie asks, “What was it like?”
“Promise not to laugh—”
“I might laugh.”
“—but I felt like I was a fixed point, and I was using the controls to make the rest of the world turn around me. I was literally the center of the universe.”
He laughs. “You feel that way all the time, though.”
She laughs, too. “Maybe I am the center of the universe. Did you ever think of that?”
“Aren’t you worried about what he wants?”
“Yes, but mostly because I don’t know what exactly that is.”
“Seems obvious to me.”
“If I thought all he wanted was to take me to bed, I’d be relieved. That would be simpler.” But she does know what he wants, or thinks she does.
You have to learn the feel of it. The dive had made her heavy; then, at the top of the loop, she had floated free in her harness.
Barclay had clutched her to him, lifting her boots off the ground. With her mouth covered by his and her body clamped against his and not even the reassurance of the porch under her feet, the determined impulse that had propelled her to kiss him collapsed into alarm and claustrophobia. He seemed to have gone blind and dumb, like a salmon beating muscularly upstream, driven by instinct. She writhed to get free, and for a second or two it seemed he would not let her go. She twisted, arching her back, and the movement seemed to wake him. He dropped her so abruptly she stumbled.
“I’m sorry,” he said, breathless, holding up his hands as though to prove he was unarmed. “You surprised me. My guard wasn’t up.”
She tried to steady herself. “It’s all right.”
They looked anywhere but at each other. Marian went to sit on the edge of the porch, and he followed, sat beside her.
She said, “I came to tell you I flew a loop today.”
“I heard Trout got a new plane. One that’s good for aerobatics.” A kingly smile.
“He said Mr. Sadler wanted another for his collection.” This was the closest allusion she had made to Barclay’s patronage, the boldest of her darting forays toward the truth.
“Sadler’s quite an aviation enthusiast,” Barclay said.