Dear Edward(5)
When the flight attendant finally steps into first class, Mark has the urge to unbuckle his seatbelt, grab her left hand with his right, wrap his other arm around her waist, and start to salsa. He doesn’t know how to salsa, but he’s pretty sure that physical contact with her would resolve the issue. She is a Broadway musical made flesh, whereas he, he realizes suddenly, is running on nothing but alcohol fumes and pretzels. He looks down at his hands, abruptly deflated. The idea of clasping her waist and starting to dance is not impossible to him. He’s done that kind of thing before; his therapist calls them “flare-ups.” He hasn’t had a flare-up in months, though. He’s sworn them off.
When he looks back up, the flight attendant is at the front of the plane, poised to announce the safety instructions. Just to keep her in their eyeline, many passengers lean into the aisle, surprised to find themselves paying attention for the first time in years.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” her voice curves through the air, “my name is Veronica, and I am the chief flight attendant. You can find me in first class, and my colleagues Ellen and Luis”—she gestures at a dimmer version of herself (lighter-brown hair, paler skin) and a bald, short man—“will be in economy. On behalf of the captain and the entire crew, welcome aboard. At this time, I ask that you please make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position. Also, as of this moment, any electronic equipment must be turned off. We appreciate your cooperation.”
Mark obediently powers off his phone. Usually he just tucks it in his pocket. He feels the sonorous welling in his chest that accompanies doing something for someone else.
Jane Adler, sitting beside him, watches the enraptured passengers with amusement. She was, she figures, actively cute for a few years in her twenties, which was when she met Bruce, but she’s never come close to wielding Veronica’s brand of sex appeal. The flight attendant is now showing the passengers how to buckle a seatbelt, and the Wall Street guy is acting like he’s never heard of a seatbelt before, much less how to operate one.
“There are several emergency exits on this aircraft,” Veronica tells them. “Please take a few moments now to locate the one nearest to you. If we need to evacuate the aircraft, floor-level lighting will illuminate and guide you toward the exits. Doors can be opened by moving the handle in the direction of the arrow. Each door is equipped with an inflatable slide, which may also be detached and used as a life raft.”
Jane knows that her husband, somewhere behind her, has already mapped out the exits and chosen which one to push the boys toward in case of an emergency. She can also sense his dismissive eye roll during the comment about inflatable slides. Bruce processes the world—and decides what’s true—based on numbers, and statistically no one has ever survived a plane crash by using an inflatable slide. They are simply a fairy tale intended to give passengers a false sense of control. Bruce has no use for fairy tales, but most people seem to like them.
Crispin wonders why he never married a woman with a body like this flight attendant’s. None of his wives had an ass to speak of. Maybe skinny girls are a young man’s game, he thinks, and it takes years to appreciate the value of a cushion in your bed. He’s not attracted to this woman; she’s the age of a couple of his grandchildren, and he has no more fire in his loins. The very idea of two people writhing around in a bed seems like a distasteful joke. It’s a joke he spent a lot of time cracking himself, of course, when he was a younger man. He realizes—gripping the arms of his chair as hot pain blinks on and off in his midsection—that all the major chapters in his personal life started and ended on wrinkled bedsheets. All the wives, the would-be wives, the ex-wives, negotiated their terms in the bedroom.
I get the kids.
We’ll be married in June at the country club.
I’ll keep the summer house.
Pay my bills, or I’ll tell your wife.
He peers at Veronica, who is now explaining how a life vest can be inflated by blowing through a straw. Maybe if the women I chose had a little more heft, he thinks, they would have stuck around longer.
“We remind you,” the flight attendant says, with a slow smile, “that this is a nonsmoking flight. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask one of our crew members. On behalf of Trinity Airlines, I”—she lingers on the word, sending it out like a soap bubble into the air—“wish you an enjoyable flight.”
Veronica steps out of view then, and, without a focal point, the passengers pick up books or magazines. Some close their eyes. The vents hiss louder. Partly because the sound comes from above, and partly because it is combined with blasts of icy air, the hiss makes people uncomfortable.
Jane Adler pulls her sweater tighter to fight off the cold and nestles into her guilt for not finishing the script before this flight. She hates to fly, and now she has to fly apart from her family. It’s punishment, she thinks. For my laziness, for my avoidance, for my taking on this crazy assignment in the first place. She had written for a television series in New York for so long, partly because it involved no travel. But here she is, taking another chance, another job, and another plane ride.
She follows her thoughts down a familiar path; when she’s anxious, she replays moments from her life, perhaps to convince herself that she has a history. She has created memories, which means she will create more. She and her sister run on a flat Canadian beach; she silently, amicably, splits the newspaper with her father at the kitchen table; she pees in a public park after drinking too much champagne at a college formal; she watches Bruce, his face wrinkled in thought on a street corner in the West Village; she gives birth to her youngest son without drugs, in a hot tub, amazed at the bovine noises rising from her lungs. There’s the stack of her seven favorite novels that she’s been curating since childhood, and her best friend, Tilly, and the dress she wears to all important meetings because it makes her feel both pulled together and thin. The way her grandmother puckered her lips, and blew air kisses, and sang greetings: Hello, hello!