Fly Boy
(Daedalus and Icarus)
I knew Billy from the time he was a very little boy, a friend of my son’s at school.
He arrived in the middle of term with a deep suntan and a broken arm. We soon learned he had put on a cape and, sure he could fly like Superman, jumped out a window onto a lawn of snow.
“He had a broomstick in there to make it like wings,” my son Tom explained.
Once, we thought of hiring his father to rebuild our summer home, but he was far too expensive and important an architect by then—designing and building towers in Dubai and Singapore, daring buildings with infinity-edged terraces in Miami that looked like you might swim off into the sky. He was commissioned for museums and consulted for the World Trade Center Tower.
We never saw Billy’s father at school events though his mother was summoned regularly to be gently lectured and cautioned when Billy crumpled his worksheets and stared out the windows.
Later, Billy was a wild boy, first on the teams, last in academics. He was always getting chastised and warned of expulsion even as his father was building the school’s rooftop expansion. Billy lived without rules except to get by them. The boys had to wear ties in the classroom, he wore his flipped over one shoulder.
Billy was popular as a daredevil always is, sought after, also, because of his father’s fame, his mother’s presence on various boards, her breeding and beauty. We all wanted to be at home when, and if, Billy’s mother came to pick him up. We all tried, but she never stayed.
We lived nearby and I used to see the boys heading to the park, rows of little blond boys, one token black boy, an Asian, and Billy with his dark curls and height leading the pack right after the masters.
I knew him then as a big handsome sweaty boy, already almost manly, toting heavy bags of sports equipment. He was polite enough but sneaky in his ways. He looked at me as though he knew my secrets and made me very uncomfortable. We quickly determined that he was a bad influence on our Tom. Privately, we called him “Candlewick” for the boy who had led Pinocchio astray.
When Billy was over at our apartment, he was always a big talker. When he learned I liked stories of animals that had escaped from zoos, he would bring me news of some runaway ape or octopus who had gotten out and was on the loose, and we would both be laughing, while my Tom sat there quiet and disapproving.
On weekends, Billy would go off with his father touring construction sights, walking inside the bones of the buildings. A few times, he brought Tom along to stand with them, wearing a hard hat on platforms way above the city or wading through water under steel beams threaded with electrical cables. Once, Billy’s father brought them inside the unfinished extension at the very top of the Guggenheim museum, a place where no civilian had ever been before.
Tom was holding on to a girder. Billy was straddling two beams with a drop in between, a feat thrilling to my Tom. Then his father had turned around and seen them both and snatched at Billy to pull him to safety.
He began an ongoing lecture, most of which Tom was there to hear. The theme was choosing the middle path. His father tried to temper Billy and guide him from impetuousness and undeserved conceit in his abilities to the known path and its safety. I’m afraid he used Tom as an example for his wild son.
He pointed to the sky. He pointed to the ground and he drew a line in the air for his extreme and impatient son—the middle path.
“But, Dad, you don’t live that way,” Billy had said.
When Billy left Allen Stevenson for boarding school, we were greatly relieved. My friends with daughters would tell stories about Billy’s escapades, knowing that I had known him from before. Once, there was rumor of a rape, immediately hushed up. I doubted the story anyway because, according to my friends, girls were always throwing themselves at him.
Tom told me that Milly Potter, a girl from Brearley, had an abortion and then was disappeared for the rest of the term with, what was called even then, by the old fashioned term, a “nervous breakdown.”
On vacations, Billy would call Tom and the old gang to play touch football in the park. At night, he was the captain, my husband said “ringleader,” of a much faster crowd, one that always found its way into the clubs.
This band of big underage boys with money hung about with the kind of model-type girls that every club wanted. My hairdresser called them “chair girls,” girls who looked so good that others would want to be wherever they were. With long sashes of hair and texting thumbs, they sat with giant corollas of silver foil streaking their roots. They all seemed to be named Christine or Taylor. Billy was dominant in this group, Tom was very much of the fringe. It does not hurt me to say this, not now.
I lost interest in Billy for a long while until I read of the accident. His father, carried off by a violent wind, fell from one of his half-built towers. He left a fortune to his wife and Billy who became even wilder then.
Billy got into Amherst, though there was nothing in his record but sports and the fact of his grandfather’s endowment to merit his admission.
He went paragliding over the ocean and bungee jumped from cliffs. He rafted on white waters and now could afford the motorcycle he once had begged for. He went wilderness camping and took up mountain climbing. At least, this kept him out of the clubs for a while.
“No scruples, no morals,” said my husband who liked to read the New York Post while shaking his head in daily disapproval. Billy had become a creature of the columns, photographed at downtown parties, wrapped around semi-famous women. He was known, mercy me, as “the Silver Stud.”
Tom, who was then about to go law school, his path totally diverged from Billy, rarely heard from him. Billy was studying film and interested in fashion photography then. Sometimes they referred to him as a conceptual artist. To my husband, this creature of tabloid glamor was merely a bum.
Now, he had money for a plane and began to take flying lessons in another state so his mother would never hear of it. With his instructor aboard he brought girls up in the air. He started flying over the beaches of the Cape in his two seat Ikarus plane. He offered to fly Tom out to Princeton. Tom made the mistake of mentioning this to us.
My husband began to shout and took Tom by the shoulders, shaking and scaring him out of the idea because he had never acted quite like that before.
All Billy wanted to do at this time was to fly. He hung out at Teterboro discussing planes with the private pilots and feeling important. He used any excuse to fly himself to East Hampton. He still had not quite mastered his instruments, so he usually had a co-pilot. He brought along the kind of girls who flew wearing shorts with bikinis underneath. Billy always flew a bit higher than the flight plan called for, it was later said.
One summer afternoon, I stopped into Harbs, a new Japanese bakery on the corner of Third Avenue. I had heard that a slice of one of their special cakes cost a shocking twelve dollars.
A warm heavy hand pressed my shoulder.
“Billy!” I must point out that, at 25, Billy was on roller blades, wearing shorts, and one of those hideous “wife beater” undershirts that showed off his tattoos. On one knee was a thick bandage and leather brace.
“How’s Tom, Mrs. B.?”
“He’s finishing up at Columbia Law,” I said with a sigh of pride and, I could not help it, I gave him a mother’s look.
“I’ve been trying to get him to go up with me. I fly now.”
“Well, Billy, I can remember when you first tried that,” I said, but I don’t think it registered or maybe he had just forgotten.
“Um, this is Milly Potter,” he said indicating the girl, not on skates, standing behind him.
“I think I’d like the whole cake to go,” he said to the woman “Tell him I said ‘hi’.”
And off he skated with Milly Potter following, carefully cradling the cake box.
I wondered what he was doing in the neighborhood, on the very street where he had suffered through school and with the very girl he once harmed. Perhaps he had returned to the middle path after all, as his father had cautioned, though it didn’t seem so.
It did not make sense, and I am the kind of person who insists upon things making sense. Perhaps he went to see his mother, but dressed like that? Never—but yes, just like that to make some kind of point, with that acceptable girl and that outrageous cake in tow.
I sat at one of the small tables with my slice of green tea mousse cake thinking of those of us who lived here, had always lived here even as the buildings and stores and restaurants changed and closed around us. We, the neighborhood elders, knew the old trees and paths of the park, saw or dodged family and friends on its streets, we knew its boundaries. We’d been on sleds on the same hill where we took our children. Billy was a boy who arrived here without boundaries and escaped like one of his runaway zoo animals for downtown and that other life we sometimes suspected was more fun.
It was on the following weekend that Billy flew his plane into an evening haze, without his co-pilot and with the heavy brace I had seen on his knee. Milly Potter was with him and,I would have bet, she was not one of those girls who ever flew in shorts over a bikini.
Tom was typically diligent in trying to reconstruct everything that had happened. He began by focusing on the haze that had scared off Billy’s copilot. It was the kind of black night people find at the shore when they come in from the terrace shivering.
I knew that Billy would fly when others would not. He would fly when there was no visibility because of his dangerous confidence, because he had survived before, because he was just the same boy in the cape.
Tom kept at it, reading a pilot’s description of “black hole vertigo,”a disorientation that occurs when reason, instinct, and the instruments are all in impossible conflict.
“He couldn’t go for the middle path,” Tom told us “he could not find it.”
He was spinning up, spiraling down, probably with poor Milly Potter screaming her head off, trying, with the last of her Brearley girl’s studious mind, to read the instruments spinning into the red zone in that time when down seemed up.
Billy and his plane slammed into the Atlantic waters that starless night. Also aboard, strapped into her seat was a young girl who loved him. I would always see her holding the cake box, following him, trying to keep up as he skated on.
We could have learned a lesson from Billy and the way he lived, but we were never that kind of people.