Read A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories for Free Online Page A

to the sea. The day here is shot, the sun gone, the cloud cover a bald dusk, but in the far west that fuzzy line of light persists on the sea’s edge.
    “They’re having brunch on the veranda in Waikiki.”
    “I’m as far West as I go.” Judith says into the wind. “This is it for me.”
    I don’t want to argue with her. It is a relief not wanting to argue. It is not my fault she came to California. I don’t want to say that again. I don’t want to attack Reichert or defend him or any of the dozen other people we both still see, all of them bright, well-educated, charming people, mostly young, and every one of them integrally involved in film projects that are hideous or silly. I won’t argue. It is a relief. All I want is a beer. I want to push off this rail and walk back, swinging my legs, feeling my knees as we climb the steps, and go back across the street and have another beer.
    “You think it’s possible to write a good movie?” Judith says, turning to me.
    “I think it’s less possible than a year ago.”
    “Oh good, I can’t wait until tomorrow.”
    I nearly say Neither can I, but that is exactly how we used to talk. I say: “Judith, let me buy you a pint of bitter and a sandwich.”
    “You think this is a good country? You think this is a livable country?”
    I am not going to do this. “Judith, I can’t go on without a pint,” I say, stepping away from the rail. It is an old joke from London. I walk back to the first silver owl, as Judith calls the coin-operated binoculars on the pier.
    Way out there I can see the guy from Paramount leaning back on one elbow drinking wine in the gray wind. Where do they learn that stuff? I close my eyes. I try to remember the name of the pub in Highgate across from Coleridge’s grave. I can’t get it. We walked there once on Easter, up through the cemetery where we stood before Marx’s tomb, and now I’m trying to remember Marx’s tomb: “Workers of the World Unite, ours is not to something something, but to change something.” There was a green-headed mallard on every stone crucifer. Judith and I sat on a green bench in the park and argued about something. The ducks were all mating, walking in circles around us, and then we walked up to the pub which had been a real coach stop in the old days, and it’s name was. I can’t remember.
    I can remember Judith, after she started writing for Reichert, coming home late in the car. She wouldn’t come in the house. I would go out after a while and find her sitting in the Rabbit, listening to the end of a Jackson Browne tape. I should have known. It was Reichert’s tape: Hold Out. It was the Era of Maximum Smiling; she called it that. She’d look up from the car and smile. “This is the Era of Maximum Smiling,” she’d say.
    I wanted then to remind her that the Era of Quality Smiling was when we could watch the kites on Parliament Hill on the heath, when we could see all of London grumbling beneath us, when we would smile at the idea of writing in California. But it was too late. When a woman sits in the car listening to tapes, it’s too late.
    I walk almost to the second silver owl when Judith catches up. We step back onto the continent, cross the beach, and by the time we’re at the top of the stairs, she’s taken my arm. She doesn’t speak except to say, “David Niven’s dead,” as we cross the street and go into the King’s Head.
    At the table, it starts. Her face, and I see again that it is a good face, the only face, falls. When she leans forward to take her face in her hands, I can see the silver cartridge again and all the little red marks above her breasts where her jewelry has nicked her over the years. I remember that after she’d shower it looked like a light coral necklace there. “God, Doug,” she says. “I don’t know whether to go forward or backward anymore.” She’s about to cry.
    I feel the old numbness rise in my neck, the old bad confusion. I’m glad the girl has