Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [119]
Brushing back his bangs, he leaned forward and stuck the point of the compass into the lower-right-hand corner of the watermarked page. He deftly inscribed an arc, and then, with the precision of a draftsman, spun the compass around on the pencil tip, replanting the needle point in the center of the paper in order to draw a tangential circle. Within moments he had a series of circles and interlinking arcs. Laying his ruler down, he scored diagonal lines the way a ship’s navigator sets a course on the bridge. Once the blueprint was complete, he began folding along the various diagonals, using his fingernail to sharpen each crease with a satisfying ssffit.
As Dicky worked, the tip of his tongue pointed through his teeth. In four months, it was probably the longest I had seen him go without talking. It was certainly the longest I had seen him focused on a single endeavor. Part of the joy of Dicky was the ableness with which he flitted from moment to moment and topic to topic like a sparrow in a hurricane of crumbs. But here he displayed an unself-conscious immersion that seemed more suited to a defuser of bombs; and pretty endearing it was. After all, no man in his right mind would make a paper airplane with such care in order to impress a woman.
—Voila, he said at last, holding the first plane on both palms.
But if I enjoyed watching Dicky at work, I was none too confident in his aerodynamics. It looked like no plane I had ever seen. Where the planes of the day had smooth titanium noses, rounded bellies, and wings that jutted out of the fuselage like the arms of the cross, Dicky’s plane was a cantilevered triangle. It had the nose of a possum and the tail of a peacock and wings that had the pleats of a drape.
Leaning a little over the balcony, he licked his finger and held it in the air.
—Sixty-five degrees; wind at half a knot; two miles of visibility. It’s a perfect night for flying.
There was no disputing that.
—Here, he said, handing me the binoculars.
I laughed and left them in my lap. He was too preoccupied to laugh back.
—Away we go, he said.
He took one last look at his engineering, then he stepped forward and extended his arm with a motion akin to a swan extending its neck.
Well, the thing of it is—Dicky’s streamlined triangular fuselage may not have mimicked the planes of the day, but it perfectly anticipated the supersonic jets of the future. The plane shot out over Eighty-third Street without a tremble. It sailed through the air for a few seconds at a slight incline, leveled, and then began to drift slowly toward its mark. I scrambled for the binoculars. It took me a moment to sight the plane. It was drifting southward on a prevailing current. Ever so slightly, it began to wobble, and then descend. It disappeared into the shadows of a balcony on the nineteenth floor of No. 50—two addresses west and three floors shy of our target.
—Drat, Dicky said, with enthusiasm.
He turned to me with a touch of paternal concern.
—Don’t be discouraged.
—Discouraged?
I stood up and smooched him on the smacker. When I pulled back, he smiled and said:
—Back to work!
Dicky didn’t have one paper airplane—he had fifty. There were triple folds, quadruple folds, quintuple folds, some of which were doubled back and reversed in quick succession, creating wing shapes that one wouldn’t have thought possible without tearing the paper in two. There were those with a truncated wing and a needle nose, others with condors’ wings and narrow submarine-like bodies ballasted with paper clips.
As we sent the requests across Eighty-third Street, I began to slowly understand that Dicky’s proficiency lay not simply in the engineering of the planes, but in his launching techniques too. Depending on the plane’s structure he would use more or less force, more or less incline, showing the expertise of one who has launched a thousand solo flights across a thousand Eighty-third streets in a thousand weather conditions.
By ten o’clock, the ponderous party had come to an end; the young revolutionaries