Flying to America Read Online Free PDF

waving his hands in the air and shouting into a walkie-talkie.
    “Why don’t we have a child?” I say to Perpetua. “Or something.”
    “Good God,” she says. “You are optimistic. What’s got into you?”
    “Once in a while I say something spontaneously. Something ill-considered.”
    “Flying to America,” she says.
    “Well, yes.”

Perpetua
    N ow Perpetua was living alone. She had told her husband that she didn’t want to live with him any longer.
    “Why not?” he had asked.
    “For all the reasons you know,” she said.
    Harold’s farewell gift was a Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance policy, paid up for one year. Now Perpetua was putting valve oil on her trumpet. One of the valves was sticking. She was fourth-chair trumpet with the New World Symphony Orchestra.
    Perpetua thought: That time he banged the car door on my finger. I am sure it was deliberate. That he locked me out while I was pregnant and I had to walk four miles after midnight to my father’s house. One does not forget.
    Perpetua smiled at the new life she saw spread out before her like a red velvet map.
    Back in the former house, Harold watched television.
    Perpetua remembered the year she was five. She had to learn to be nice, all in one year. She only learned part of it. She was not fully nice until she was seven.
    Now I must obtain a lover, she thought. Perhaps more than one. One for Monday, one for Tuesday, one for Wednesday . . .
    2.
    Harold was looking at a picture of the back of a naked girl, in a magazine for men. The girl was pulling a dress over her head, in the picture. This girl has a nice-looking back, Harold thought. I wonder where she lives?
    Perpetua sat on the couch in her new apartment smoking dope with a handsome bassoon player. A few cats walked around.
    “Our art contributes nothing to the revolution,” the bassoon player said. “We cosmeticize reality.”
    “We are trustees of Form,” Perpetua said.
    “It is hard to make the revolution with a bassoon,” the bassoon player said.
    “Sabotage?” Perpetua suggested.
    “Sabotage would get me fired,” her companion replied. “The sabotage would be confused with ineptness anyway.”
    I am tired of talking about the revolution, Perpetua thought.
    “Go away,” she said. The bassoon player put on his black raincoat and left.
    It is wonderful to be able to tell them to go away, she reflected. Then she said aloud, “Go away. Go away. Go away.”
    Harold went to visit his child, Peter. Peter was at school in New England. “How do you like school?” Harold asked Peter.
    “It’s O.K.,” Peter said. “Do you have a light?”
    Harold and Peter watched the game together. Peter’s school won. After the game, Harold went home.
    3.
    Perpetua went to her mother’s house for Christmas. Her mother was cooking the eighty-seventh turkey of her life. “God damn this turkey!” Perpetua’s mother shouted. “If anyone knew how I hate, loathe, and despise turkeys. If I had known that I would cook eighty-seven separate and distinct turkeys in my life, I would have split forty-four years ago. I would have been long gone for the tall timber.”
    Perpetua’s mother showed her a handsome new leather coat.“Tanned in the bile of matricides,” her mother said, with a meaningful look.
    Harold wrote to the magazine for men asking for the name and address of the girl whose back had bewitched him. The magazine answered his letter saying that it could not reveal this information. The magazine was not a pimp, it said.
    Harold, enraged, wrote to the magazine and said that if the magazine was not a pimp, what was it? The magazine answered that while it could not in all conscience give Harold the girl’s address, it would be glad to give him her grid coordinates. Harold, who had had map reading in the Army, was delighted.
    4.
    Perpetua sat in the trumpet section of the New World Symphony Orchestra. She had a good view of the other players because the sections were on risers and the