“I’m Sabra Wilmutt,” the woman said.
“I’m Jonquil J. Christ.”
Sabra’s face looked suddenly slapped and lopsided. She said, “I don’t get it.”
“The J is for Jesus.”
As Ava spoke, the reboarding announcement was made.
What does it matter? Ava’s expression said to Steadman, who had heard it all. But Steadman had been attentive to the woman named Sabra, immersed in Trespassing. It was just this awful flight to get through, and after that they would never see any of them again.
2
AIRBORNE ONCE MORE, isolated and blindfolded, with the slipstream crackling at the airplane’s windows and fizzing along the fuselage, the passengers were at last silenced. Steadman reflected on what they had said. They were boasting, of course, but because most boasting was bluff and lies, really they had given very little away. He took them to be lawyers, even the one who had sold his company, because of their affectations. Lawyers never volunteered the truth, because the truth was debatable, and this was why they could hold two opposing views in their head, and seemed capable of believing both, as they tossed out challenges and suppositions, speaking in irrelevancies calculated to throw you off. The merchandising of Trespassing was a wilderness of lawyers waving contracts. Challenge them with a tough question and they handed you a sandwich.
But he said to Ava, “What was that all about?” for the way she had called attention to herself among those strangers. Steadman had described in Trespassing how it was always a fatal mistake in travel to be conspicuous. The greatest travelers made themselves invisible. An invisible man was a man of power.
Ava just shrugged, pretending he was worked up over nothing. Yet she knew she was motivated by their breakup. Underlying her sarcasm was the suspicion that if the people found out that she was with Steadman the famous writer, he would have to take the blame for her behavior: her insolence was his insolence. Breaking up had liberated Ava and made her reckless and indifferent to his worry, helped her see what a baby he was—“and writing is your dolly.” She couldn’t play with it, couldn’t even touch it. He fussed with it in his room. And as time had passed the dolly had become more special, first a toy, then a fetish object, then a totem, and finally an idol that represented something approaching a deity. “Fucking writers,” Ava had begun saying.
Steadman had carefully not asked the other people any questions for fear they would ask him the same things. He was on this trip for a reason, his own assignment, and he wanted it to be secret. He had covertly been taking notes, and he was still taking them. The meal trays had been cleared and he had just written the word máscara.
The lovely, dark-eyed, plump-lipped woman, looking like a prison guard in her black uniform, was the flight attendant. Brisk and busy, she murmured, “Mascara, mascara moving down the aisle, handing out blindfolds. Each passenger accepted one awkwardly {as though they had been handed a condom, he noted, which in a sense they had) and with varying reactions: bewilderment, suspicion, surprise, amusement, embarrassment. None had looked grateful, yet each had put the blindfold on.
Turning to size up the masked passengers, Steadman had taken a good look at the Trespassing Treads — the hiking shoes — and the Trespassing cargo pants and multipocket vests and the Trespassing daypack at Hack’s feet. The woman named Sabra was reading Trespassing— or, rather, not reading it, since the thick thing lay spread open, turned over on her lap.
Just behind them was Manfred, the man who had announced in a heavy German accent that he was an American. He pulled the mask over his eyes and ratcheted his seat back and slept. He was wearing black Mephisto hiking shoes and a black hat and black leather vest. In their blindfolding they seemed to Steadman like participants in a solemn ceremony, some of them novices, some old hands. That did not make the blindfolds any less bizarre, yet it was somehow appropriate to this night flight to Ecuador, all of them gringos, more or less unprepared — willing and innocent and irrationally confident, flying blind.
Passing the blindfold to Ava, Steadman had noticed her trying to suppress a smile. She had not smiled for weeks, especially not that sort, a coquettish curl of the lips, with so much understood in it. When she put the blindfold on she was still smiling, looking helpless and eager, her mouth kissing air, like an amorous wink with her lips that suggested she knew she was being watched. Steadman touched her hand, and she snagged his fingers and squeezed. At that point Steadman put his own mask over his eyes.
He thought about the stopover, the delay, how the people who talk the most, using those cliches, pretending to be inarticulate, were often the reverse, and trying to hide something.
How much they had told him: the SUV, the house, the sale of the business, the shoes, the biking, the knife, the travel, the gear that he knew only too well — all of it could be summed up in one word, money. They meant it when they called themselves A-players, and were serious only in their jokes.
His desire as a writer, as a man, was to know them, to see into them, behind their masks. To translate what they said. To know them on the most fundamental level. But he knew enough now to dismiss them and go the other way, to use what he had found.
“You’re a pornographer,” Ava had said to him recently, to irritate him, another truthful piece of abuse from their breakup.
Yes, he thought, the truest expression of our being is our passionate engagement in the act of sex. To know that was to know almost everything, that we are most ourselves in sex, our most monkey-like, our most human, so why shouldn’t he be fascinated? He realized this now because it was over with them, until last night no sex for months, only her hideous efficiency and angry humor and her long days and nights at the hospital.
Shifting in her seat, seeming to wake, Ava sighed. Steadman hated it when she talked to strangers. Once it had been he doing it, and he had thrived. But that ended, and now he listened to her. Her talk bored him, made him anxious; she never knew when to stop. Neither of them hid their annoyance. But what did it matter? This was their last trip. They had planned it for months, and the very planning of it, as the most ambitious holiday they had ever had, put such a strain on them, all the negotiation that collapsed into nagging and quarreling, that they realized how unsuited they were to each other.
They were certain now that they would split up, and this realization calmed them and released them from their struggle. Recognizing that they had reached a conclusion more final than a truce, they had the dull serenity and silent patience of a couple who know they have no future. It was better to see each other as a stranger than as an enemy, and in this slipping away they lost much of their history — the false, insincere part that had been their meaningless romance. They were tougher, not sentimental, hard to convince. No favors: with none of the frivolous generosity of lovers, they were, oddly, now equals. But more circumspect, less knowable, than when they had first met.
So this trip was practical. Though the planning had been full of conflict and taken so long, they went ahead with it. They had to take the trip or they would lose their deposit and forfeit the plane tickets. Ava said, “You actually care about the money?” The money was a pretext for the mission: he hoped the trip would lead him to his book.
Holding the blindfold, he said, “This thing cost two grand.”
She said, “It’s probably worth it.”
To travel in separate rows, to pretend not to know each other, would have been ridiculous — they had discussed these strategies. They still needed each other, needed most of all to be let down gently, to part without drama. They still liked being together, even if they were no longer in love. The finality — the peculiarity of nothingness, no hope, no future — affected their sex life, gave it a vicious push. The night before they left they made love as though they were strangers, meeting by chance, emboldened by their anonymity to be selfish, even brutal, seeming to use each other. But the rough grappling in the dark room surprised and delighted them, afterward leaving them gasping, sprawling naked on the carpet, looking beaten and broken, as though they had fallen to the floor from a great height.