Some Things About Flying by Joan Barfoot Page A

shelves have sketches and carvings and bits and pieces to remind me of a particular event. So I can go into that room and see my whole life. The travelling parts, anyway.”
    Many tales in one crowded room, evidently.
    And what would he take back for that room from this trip? What, someday, might he see on a shelf to remind him of Lila?
    â€œHardly gauche,” she said. “It sounds rather nice. I have things from my travels, as well, but nothing so determined.” She has tended to count on memory—of Paul’s lean limbs, of the spot Virginia walked into the water weighted with stones, of egg sandwiches on a French train, of chanted echoes in vaulting cathedrals, of smells and colours, crowds and companions and moments of solitude—rather than memorabilia; but who knows if that was wise?
    If they survive this, it will not have been a trip requiring a souvenir to keep it vivid.
    â€œI see myself as an old man sitting in one of those chairs, looking around and remembering everything and being grateful for so much.” Lila wondered if he pictured his wife in the other chair. She wondered if his wife also collected memories of journeys, in the form of, say, carvings, or tapestries. Perhaps that’s what got her interested in crafts in the first place.
    In Tom and Lila’s earlier days, they closed her front door behind them and steamed to her bedroom, tossing off covers and clothes. More recently, having become sedate (or regrettably accustomed), they’ve been as likely to sit on her pearly-grey sofa discussing their days over drinks, exchanging work worries, offering suggestions and tactics. On good days Lila has set out cheese and biscuits, but after ones spent watching ideas and words ricochet off particularly impenetrable students, she might just dump chips into a bowl. Tom mixes drinks.
    Once, she called this time “a sort of picture frame around each day,” and he nodded. Still, it was different from clutching at each other in cars and barely making it home. There were some startled moments in those days, catching sight of steamed windows. Surprised by herself, she’d said, “This is very bad.”
    â€œPositively adolescent.” He grinned.
    â€œIf we get caught, people will think we’re ridiculously old to be necking in cars.”
    â€œIf we get caught, they’ll be extremely impressed.”
    She was rather impressed herself. And skittish, as he must have been, too, because really, jokes aside, getting caught would be awful. Some people would be thrilled, a few gravely injured. Mainly, events would unfold and occur that would be out of their hands.
    There are serious consequences to desire, although it isn’t easy always to keep them in mind.
    There must be rumours. In the close, peculiar setting of the campus, neither affection nor hostility goes unnoticed. Tom and Lila have counted on the many possibilities for misinterpretation, and the unlikelihood of proof. Except for when they’ve been overcome, they’ve been tremendously clever.
    Now this, though.
    They have continued to be overcome sometimes, but mainly in private. They might spend hours on her sofa discussing their respective days, their work, their students, their frustrations and their different fields of interest, and drinking, watching television, commenting on this and that (like massacres, like blood), but they also continue to slide into her dark, muffled bedroom, to tear, carefully, at each other’s clothes, and to fall around each other with happy lust. They have been attentive to each other’s desires, in Lila’s view. Not all her lovers have been as clever as Tom.
    Eventually he has roused himself to drive into the night, home to what remains of his family. To the no-longer-depressed Dorothy, that handy, surprisingly capable businesswoman. In high school, where Tom and Dorothy met, she was apparently a cheerleader named Dot, but it wouldn’t be fair,