“Hi,” she said. “I’m in the middle there.”
“By all means.” The force of his anger entered his magnanimity and swelled it hugely; he pinched his ankles together to let her by. She put her bag under the seat in front of her, sat down, and rested her booted feet on its pale leather. The old shark by the window glanced appraisingly at her breasts through her open coat. He looked up at her face and made smile movements. The stewardess did her parody of a suffocating person reaching for an air mask, the pilot mumbled, the plane prepared to assert its unnatural presence in nature.
“They said I’d missed my flight by fifteen minutes,” she said. “But I knew I’d make it. They’re never on time.” Her voice was unexpectedly small, with a rough, gravelly undertone that was seedy and schoolgirlish at once.
“It’s bullshit,” he said. “Well, what can you do?” She had large hazel eyes.
She smiled a tight, rueful smile that he associated with women who’d been fucked too many times and which he found sexy. She cuddled more deeply into her seat, produced a People magazine, and intently read it. He liked her profile—which was an interesting combination of soft (forehead, chin) and sharp (nose, cheekbones)—her shoulder-length, pale-brown hair, and her soft Mediterranean skin. He liked the coarse quality in the subtle downturn of her lips, and the heavy way her lids sat on her eyes. She was older than he’d originally thought, probably in her early thirties.
Who did she remind him of? A girl from a long time ago, an older version of some date or crush or screw. Or love, he thought gamely.
The pilot said they would be leaving the ground shortly. She was now reading a feature that appeared to be about the wedding of two people who had AIDS. He thought of his wife, at home in Minneapolis, at the stove poking at something, in the living room reading, the fuzzy pink of her favorite sweater. The plane charged and tore a hole in the air.
He reviewed his mental file of girls he’d known before his wife and paused at the memory of Andrea, the girl who’d made an ass-hole of him. It had been twelve years, and only now could he say that phrase to himself, the only phrase that accurately described the situation. With stale resentment, he regarded her: a pale, long-legged thing with huge gray eyes, a small mouth, long red hair, and the helpless manner of a pampered pet let loose in the wilderness.
The woman next to him was hurriedly flipping the pages of People, presumably looking for something as engrossing as the AIDS wedding. When she didn’t find it, she closed the magazine and turned to him in a way that invited conversation.
She said she’d lived in L.A. for eight years and that she liked it, even though it was “gross.”
“I’ve never been to L.A.,” he said. “I picture it being like L.A. Law. Is it like that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen L.A. Law. I don’t watch TV I don’t own one.”
He had never known a person who didn’t own a TV, not even an old high school friend who lived in a slum and got food stamps. “You must read the newspapers a lot.”
“No. I don’t read them much at all.”
He was incredulous. “How do you connect with the rest of the world? How do you know anything?”
“I’m part of the world. I know a lot of things.”
He expelled a snort of laughter. “That’s an awfully small perspective you’ve got there.”
She shrugged and turned her head, and he was sorry he’d been rude. He glanced at her profile to read her expression and—of course; she reminded him of Patty LaForge, poor Patty.
He had met Patty at Meadow Community College in Coate, Minnesota. He was in his last semester; she had just entered. They worked in the student union cafeteria, preparing, serving, and snacking on denatured food. She was a slim, curvy person with dark-blond hair, hazel eyes, and remarkable legs and hips. Her beauty was spoiled by the aggressive resignation that held her features in a fixed position and made all her expressions stiff. Her full mouth had a bitter downturn, and her voice was quick, low, self-deprecating, and sarcastic. She presented her beautiful body statically, as if it were a shield, and the effort of this presentation seemed to be the source of her animation.
Most of the people he knew at Meadow were kids he’d gone to high school and even junior high with. They still lived at home and still drove their cars around together at night, drank in the small bars of Coate, adventured in Minneapolis, and made love to each other. This late-adolescent camaraderie gave their time at Meadow a fraught emotional quality that was like the shimmering fullness of a bead of water before it falls. They were all about to scatter and become different from one another, and this made them exult in their closeness and alikeness.
The woman on the plane was flying to Kentucky to visit her parents and stopping over in Cincinnati.
“Did you grow up in Kentucky?” he asked. He imagined her as a big-eyed child in a cotton shift, playing in some dusty, sunny alley, some rural Kentucky-like place. Funny she had grown up to be this wan little bun with too much makeup in black creases under her eyes.
“No. I was born there, but I grew up mostly in Minnesota, near Minneapolis.”
He turned away, registered the little shock of coincidence, and turned back. The situation compounded: she had gone to Redford Community College in Thorold, a suburb much like Coate. She had grown up in Thorold, like Patty. The only reason Patty had gone to Meadow was that Redford didn’t exist yet.
He felt a surge of commonality. He imagined that she had experienced his adolescence, and this made him experience it for a moment. He had loved walking the small, neat walkways of the campus through the stiffly banked hedges of snow and harsh morning austerity, entering the close, food-smelling student union with the hard winter air popping off his skin. He would see his friends standing in a conspiratorial huddle, warming their hands on cheap cups of coffee; he always remembered the face of a particular girl, Layla, turning to greet him, looking over her frail sloped shoulder, her hair a bunched dark tangle, her round eyes ringed with green pencil, her perfectly ordinary face compelling in its configurations of girlish curiosity, maternal license, sexual knowledge, forgiveness, and femininity. A familiar mystery he had meant to explore some-time and never did, except when he grabbed her butt at a Halloween party and she smiled like a mother of four who worked as a porn model on the side. He loved driving with his friends to the Red Owl to buy alcohol and bagged salty snacks, which they consumed as they drove around Coate playing the tape deck and yelling at each other, the beautiful ordinary landscape unpeeling before them, revealing the essential strangeness of its shadows and night movements. He loved driving with girls to the deserted housing development they called “the Spot,” loved the blurred memories of the girls in the back seat with their naked legs curled up to their chests, their shirts bunched about their necks, their eyes wide with ardor and alcohol, beer and potato chips spilled on the floor of the car, the tape deck singing of love and triumph. He getting out of the car for a triumphant piss, while the girl daintily replaced her pants. In the morning his mother would make him “cowboy eggs,” eggs fried on top of bacon, and he would go through the cold to Meadow, to sit in a fluorescent classroom and dream.
“Did you like growing up in that area?” she asked.
“Like it? It was the greatest time of my life.” Some extremity in his voice made her look away, and as she did, he looked more fully at her profile. She didn’t look that much like Patty; she wasn’t even blond. But the small physical resemblance was augmented by a less tangible affinity, a telling similarity of speech and movement.