Dear Edward(11)

Florida lived in New York during her twenties and early thirties, but she never pictures only one period of time; she has to think of them all, layered on top of each other like a Mexican dip. She’s lived many lives, in many bodies, so her memories are oceanic—a body of water she swims regularly. She tried to count her lives once and reached thirteen before the project bored her. Some lives she entered as a walk-in, which meant she’d entered the body of someone whose soul had departed after either a physical trauma—like a car accident that left the person in a coma—or an attempted suicide. Those entries were innately exciting, and therefore her favorite kind. There was nothing like waking up in a new adult body, suffused in someone else’s aura. She was always a little disappointed when—as in her current life—she entered in the traditional manner, as a baby.

The plane climbs, and Florida finds herself remembering her most recent wedding, only seven years earlier. Two dozen friends on the piece of Vermont land she and Bobby had recently bought. The five acres were pristine then, a meadow dipping down to a stream, with a forest on the far side. They’d only just started to plan—Bobby was in charge of this, a fact Florida would later regret—and were several months from building their home. Florida’s friends had traveled up from the East Village, and there was a tent with Christmas lights and a local band. They danced in the smoky blue air to Pinoy music. Florida drank wine and shook her ass and tits and hair and sang along, her hand in her husband’s. It was one of those magic evenings when happiness shone out of every heart and face, and Florida felt knitted together by love.

The memory makes her sigh now, wedged into an airplane seat. She feels the plane rise beneath her. She glances at Linda, whose eyes are closed. She’s keenly aware of the irony. This girl is running toward a husband, while Florida is running away from one.

The plane hits thirty thousand feet, and Mark Lassio remembers something from the night before, something he’d blanked out until this moment. He was at a club, celebrating a buddy’s birthday—more a colleague than a buddy, actually—when he caught sight of an ex-girlfriend across the room. His most recent ex-girlfriend, who hated clubs, who hated to dance, who was, in fact, highly skilled at hating. She was certainly better at hating than she was at bond trading, which was her job. It was something she and Mark had had in common; they delighted in ranting to each other. After sex, they would lie in bed and take turns going off. They trashed co-workers, friends, bosses, politicians, their families, everyone. It was the best part of their relationship—there was a childlike joy to it, like flying downhill on a sled—and Mark felt a prick of true disappointment when his therapist insisted that it wasn’t healthy.

His ex had noticed him a second after he spotted her. She stood by the far wall; a crowd of people were dancing and making out between them, and the music was a collection of beats pitched at a volume designed to shake the words out of your head. He shouldn’t have been there at all; he was trying to stay clean, and he could smell the goddamn cocaine in the air. Sharp and tangy, like sliced lemon. Mark searched her face, and a question yawned open inside him. Maybe? Could we? Did we once have?

She met his look. She had dark, almost black, eyes. She shook her head and mouthed: No.

He mouthed back: Fuck you, and started to dance, something he rarely did anymore. He was off the beat at first and had to re-jig his movements to match the thumping noise. He bounced on his toes and threw his arms over his head, and when the crowd yelled along to a refrain that he couldn’t make out, he yelled too. A guy nearby gave him a startled look, then grinned and they crashed palms in a high five.

Veronica’s voice issues from the PA, and Mark cranes to see her, but she’s not in sight. She announces that the plane has reached a sufficient altitude that approved electronic devices can be used. He pulls his laptop out of the seat-back pocket at the same moment the woman sitting next to him pulls out hers. They give each other a weak smile.

“Deadline,” she says.

“Life isn’t life without them.”

She screws up her face as if she’s actually considering his words. This annoys him.

“Hmm,” she says.

Mark wants to stop talking, but he also wants this lady to know that he’s on top of everything. He says, “You have two boys. I was on the security line with you.”

His seatmate—who’s maybe forty-five, not that much older than he is but from a totally different place, probably the suburbs, definitely the marriage-and-kids lifestyle, which is another planet from the one that he lives on—looks startled. She squints at her laptop, which has powered up. “I do.”

“I have a brother,” he says. Then he thinks, Sure, that makes sense. This lady looks a little like Mom, and the boys are Jax and me. He remembers being with his family on a plane, heading to visit his grandparents. He and Jax are punching each other in the arm and splitting a Twix bar. His mom looks stressed, like this lady looks stressed, though he didn’t understand why until he grew up and started to rattle like a boiling pot about to lose its lid. His mom, quiet with thin lips, who always seemed to be turning away from him, took too many sleeping pills when Mark was eighteen and never woke up.

“I’m not sitting with them, with the boys, because I have work to do,” the woman says.

Mark takes this as a request to buzz off. He turns his attention to his own screen, which is covered with detailed graphs and tables depicting market trends, losses, and indices of change. He scans the scalp trade. He processes the S&P numbers, the CME exchange, the latest bids. He’s looking for the same thing he looks for every minute of every day: opportunities invisible to everyone but himself.