Could she be so lucky? No, no, she couldn’t, and here was another layer of superstition rising up out of the murk of her subconscious, as if luck had anything to do with her or what she’d been through already today or in the past week or month or year — or, for that matter, through the whole course of her vacant and constricted life. A name came to her lips then, a name she’d been trying, with the help of the prescription the doctor had given her, to suppress. She held it there for a moment, enlarged by her grief until she felt like the heroine of some weepy movie, a raped nun, an airman’s widow, sloe-eyed and wilting under the steady gaze of the camera. She shouldn’t have had the beer, she told herself. Or the Scotch, either. Not with the pills.
The plane quieted. The aisles cleared. She fought down her exhaustion and kept her eyes fixed on the far end of the aisle, where the last passenger — a boy in a reversed baseball cap — was fumbling into his seat. Surreptitiously, with her feet only, she shifted her bag from the space under her seat to the space beneath the window seat, and then, after a moment, she unfastened her seat belt and slipped into the unoccupied seat. She stretched her legs, adjusted her pillow and blanket, watched the flight attendants work their way up the aisle, easing shut the overhead bins. She was thinking that she should have called her mother with the new flight information — she’d call her from Chicago, that’s what she’d do — when there was movement at the front of the plane and one final passenger came through the door, even as the attendants stood by to screw it shut. Stooping to avoid the TV monitors, he came slowly down the aisle, sweeping his eyes right and left to check the row numbers, an overcoat over one arm, a soft computer bag slung over the opposite shoulder. He was dressed in a sport coat and a T-shirt, his hair cut close, after the fashion of the day, and his face seemed composed despite what must have been a mad dash through the airport. But what mattered most about him was that he seemed to be coming straight to her, to 18A, the seat she’d appropriated. And what went through her mind? A curse, that was all. Just a curse.
Sure enough, he paused at Row 18, glanced at the saddlebag woman, and then at Ellen, and said, “Excuse me, I believe I’m in here?”
Ellen reddened. “I thought …”
“No, no,” he said, holding Ellen’s eyes even as the saddlebag woman rolled up and out of her seat like a rock dislodged from a crevice, “stay there. It’s okay. Really.”
The pilot said something then, a garble of the usual words, the fuselage shuddered, and the plane backed away from the gate with a sudden jolt. Ellen put her head back and closed her eyes.
She woke when the drinks cart came around. There was a sour taste in her mouth, her head was throbbing, and the armrest gouged at her ribs as if it had come alive. She’d been dreaming about Roy, the man who had dismembered her life like a boy pulling the legs off an insect, Roy and that elaborate, humiliating scene in the teachers’ lounge, her mother there somehow to witness it, and then she and Roy were in bed, the stiff insistence of his erection (which turned out to be the armrest), and his hand creeping across her rib cage until it was Waldo, Waldo the tarantula, closing in on her breast. “Something to drink?” the broad-faced flight attendant was asking, and both Ellen’s seatmates seemed to be hanging on her answer. “Scotch-and-soda,” she said, without giving it a second thought.
The man beside her, the new man, the one who had offered up his seat to her, was working on his laptop, the gentle blue glow of the screen softly illuminating his lips and eyes. He looked up at the flight attendant, his fingers still poised over the keys, and murmured, “May I have a chardonnay, please?” Then it was the saddlebag woman’s turn. “Sprite,” she said, the dull thump of her voice swallowed up in the drone of the engines.
The man flattened himself against the seat back as the flight attendant leaned in to pass Ellen her drink, then he typed something hurriedly, shut down the computer, and slipped it into his lap, beneath the tray table. He took the truncated bottle, the glass, napkin and peanuts from the attendant, arranged them neatly before him, and turned to Ellen with a smile. “I never know where to put my elbows on these things,” he said, shrinking away from the armrest they shared. “It’s kind of like being in a coffin — or one of those medieval torture devices, you know what I mean?”
Ellen took a sip of her drink and felt the hot smoke of the liquor in the back of her throat. He was good-looking, handsome — more than handsome. At that moment, the engines thrumming, the flat, dull earth fanning out beneath the plane, he was shining and beautiful, as radiant as an archangel come flapping through the window to roost beside her. Not that it would matter to her. Roy was handsome too, but she was done with handsome, done with fifth graders, done with the whole failed experiment of living on her own in the big, smoggy, palm-shrouded city. Turn the page, new chapter. “Or maybe a barrel,” she heard herself say, “going over Niagara Falls.”
“Yeah,” he said, laughing through his nose. “Only in the barrel you don’t get your own personal flotation device.”
Ellen didn’t know what to say to that. She took another pull at her drink for lack of anything better to do. She was feeling it, no doubt about it, but what difference would it make if she were drunk or sober as she wandered the labyrinthine corridors of O’Hare, endlessly delayed by snow, mechanical failure, the hordes of everybody going everywhere? Three sheets to the wind, right — isn’t that what they said? And what, exactly, did that mean? Some old sailing expression, she supposed, something from the days of the clipper ships, when you vomited yourself from one place to another.
Their meals had come. The broad-faced flight attendant was again leaning in confidentially, this time with the eternal question—“Chicken or pasta?”—on her lips. Ellen wasn’t hungry — food was the last thing she wanted — but on an impulse she turned to her neighbor. “I’m not really very hungry,” she said, her face too close to his, their elbows touching, his left knee rising up out of the floor like a stanchion, “but if I get a meal, would you want it — or some of it? As an extra, I mean?”
He gave her a curious look, then said, “Sure, why not?” The flight attendant was waiting, the sealed-in smile beginning to crack at the corners with the first fidgeting of impatience. “Chicken for me,” the man said, “and pasta for the lady.” And then, to Ellen, as he shifted the tray from one hand to the other: “You sure, now? I know it’s not exactly three-star cuisine, but you’ve got to eat, and the whole reason they feed you is to make the time pass so you don’t realize how cramped and miserable you are.”
The smell of the food — salt, sugar, and animal fat made palpable — rose to her nostrils, and she felt nauseated again. Was it the pills? The alcohol? Or was it Roy — Roy, and life itself? She thought about that, and the instant she did, there he was — Roy — clawing his way back into her mind. She could see him now, his shoulders squared in his black polyester suit with the little red flecks in it — the suit she’d helped him pick out, as if he had any taste or style he could call his own — his eyes swollen out of their sockets, his lips reduced to two thin, ungenerous flaps of skin grafted to his mouth. Shit-for-brains. That’s what he’d called her, right there in the teachers’ lounge with everybody watching — Lynn Bendall and Lauren McGimpsey and that little teacher’s aide, what was her name? He was shouting, and she was shouting back, no holds barred, not anymore. So what if I am sleeping with her? What’s it to you? You think you own me? Do you? Huh, shit-for-brains? Huh? Lauren’s face was dead, but Ellen saw Lynn exchange a smirk with the little teacher’s aide, and that smirk said it all, because Lynn, it seemed, knew more about who he was sleeping with than Ellen did herself.