Flying to America Read Online Free PDF Page B

trumpet section sat on the highest riser of all. They were playing Brahms. A percussionist had just split a head on the bass drum. “I luff Brahms,” he explained.
    Perpetua thought: I wish this so-called conductor would get his movie together.
    After the concert she took off her orchestra uniform and put on her suede jeans, her shirt made of a lot of colored scarves sewn together, her carved-wood neck bracelet, and her D’Artagnan cape with its silver lining.
    Perpetua could not remember what was this year and what was last year. Had something just happened, or had it happened a long time ago? She met many new people. “You are different,” Perpetua said to Sunny Marge. “Very few of the girls I know wear a tattoo of the head of Marshal Foch on their backs.”
    “I am different,” Sunny Marge agreed. “Since I posed for that picture in that magazine for men, many people have been after my back. My back has become practically an international incident. So I decided to alter it.”
    “Will it come off? Ever?”
    “I hope and pray.”
    Perpetua slept with Robert in his loft. His children were sleeping on mattresses in the other room. It was cold. Robert said that when he was a child he was accused by his teacher of being “pert.”
    “Pert?”
    Perpetua and Robert whispered to each other, on the mattress.
    5.
    Perpetua said, “Now, I am alone. I have thrown my husband away. I remember him. Once he seemed necessary to me, or at least important, or at least interesting. Now none of these things is true. Now he is as strange to me as something in the window of a pet shop. I gaze into the pet-shop window, the Irish setters move about, making their charming moves, I see the moves and see that they are charming, yet I am not charmed. An Irish setter is what I do not need. I remember my husband awaking in the morning, inserting his penis in his penis sheath, placing ornaments of bead and feather on his upper arms, smearing his face with ochre and umber — broad lines under the eyes and across the brow. I remember him taking his blowpipe from the umbrella stand and leaving for the office. What he did there I never knew. Slew his enemies, he said. Our dinner table was decorated with the heads of his enemies, whom he had slain. It was hard to believe one man could have so many enemies. Or maybe they were the same enemies, slain over and over and over. He said he saw girls going down the street who broke his heart, in their loveliness. I no longer broke his heart, he said. I had not broken his heart for at least a year, perhaps more than a year, with my loveliness. Well screw that, I said, screw that. My oh my, he said, my oh my, what a mouth. He meant that I was foulmouthed. This, I said, is just the beginning.”
    In the desert, Harold’s Land-Rover had a flat tire. Harold got out of the Land-Rover and looked at his map. Could this be the wrong map?
    6.
    Perpetua was scrubbing Sunny Marge’s back with a typewriter eraser.
    “Oh. Ouch. Oh. Ouch.”
    “I’m not making much progress,” Perpetua said.
    “Well I suppose it will have to be done by the passage of time,” Sunny Marge said, looking at her back in the mirror.
    “Years are bearing us to Heaven,” Perpetua agreed.
    Perpetua and Sunny Marge went cruising, on the boulevard. They saw a man coming toward them.
    “He’s awfully clean-looking,” Perpetua said.
    “Probably he’s from out of town,” Sunny Marge said.
    Edmund was a small farmer.
    “What is your cash crop?” Sunny Marge asked.
    “We have two hundred acres in hops,” the farmer replied. “That reminds me, would you ladies like a drink?”
    “I’d like a drink,” Perpetua said.
    “I’d like a drink too,” Sunny Marge said. “Do you know anywhere he can go, in those clothes?”
    “Maybe we’d better go back to my place,” Perpetua said.
    At Perpetua’s apartment Edmund recounted the history of hops.
    “Would you like to see something interesting?” Sunny Marge asked