The seatbelt sign winked off, and Boadicea unstrapped herself and climbed the short windy staircase to the lounge. One other passenger had beat her to the bar, a heavy, red-faced man in a really ugly red blazer. Synthetic, she thought — a judgement against which there could be no appeal. A sin (Grandison was wont to say) may be forgiven, but not a synthetic. The man in the blazer was complaining, nasally, to the steward at the bar that every time he’d ordered a drink during takeoff the god-damn idiot machine had flashed a god-damn sign at him to say sorry, he wasn’t old enough, and god-damn it, he was thirty-two! With each god-damn, he would glance at Boadicea to see if she were scandalized. She couldn’t keep from beaming at the steward’s explanation — that the computer had got the man’s passport or seat number mixed up with someone else’s. The man mistook the meaning of her smile. With the miraculous self-regard of his kind, he came over and offered her a drink. She said she would like a pink lady.
Would four be a mistake, she wondered? Would it prevent her, when she arrived, from shining? It would scarcely do to leave in disgrace and return, two years later, drunk. So far, however, she felt in command of herself, if maybe slightly more susceptible than usual.
“Aren’t the clouds beautiful?” she said, when he’d returned with the drink and they had settled down before their first class view of heaven.
Dismissing the question with a sociable smile, he asked if this were her first trip to America. Evidently, Ste. Ursule had done its work. She said no, it had been her first trip to Europe and now she was coming back.
He asked her what she had seen. She said she’d seen art museums and churches mostly. “And you?” she asked.
“Oh, I didn’t have time to go in for that kind of thing. It was a business trip.”
“Oh. What business are you in?” She felt a guttersnipe delight in asking that most American of questions.
“I’m a representative for Consolidated Food Systems.”
“Really? My uncle is a representative too, though not for CFS. He has some connection with them, though.”
“Well, CFS is the biggest company in Des Moines, so it’s not surprising.”
“Is that where you live?”
“I live just about anywhere CFS cares to send me, and at this point they’ve sent me just about anywhere.” He had that down pat. She wondered if it were something he’d made up himself at one time, or if all the CFS salesmen learned it when they were being trained. Then he took her by surprise. “Do you know,” he said in a tone of completely believable regret, and even thoughtfulness, “I do have an apartment in Omaha, but I haven’t seen the inside of it for over a year.”
At once she felt guilty for baiting him. And why? Because he had a paunch and didn’t know how to dress? Because his voice was the whining, forlorn voice of the prairie? Because he had wanted the few minutes of their passage across the ocean to bear the stamp of an actual human encounter? Didn’t she, after all?
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think I may be drunk,” she said. “I’m not used to airplanes.”
The clouds were now so far below they looked like a formica tabletop, opaque white whorled with a dismal greyish blue. In fact, the ledge on which she’d placed her drink was made of just such lamentable formica.
“But I like,” she added, a little desperately, as he continued simply staring, “to fly. I think I could spend my whole life on the wing, just whizzing about like this. Whiz, whiz.”
He looked at his watch so as not to have to look before him at the blue beyond the glass. Even here, she realized, even at twenty-five thousand feet, it was bad form to praise the act and power of flight. America!
“And where do you live?” he asked.
“In Iowa, on a farm.”
“Is that so? A farmer’s daughter.” He fairly underlined his innuendo with a grin of masculine condescension.
She could not keep hold of a sense of fairness. Everything about the man was an offense to decency — his flat, uninflected speech, his complacence, his stupidity. He seemed thoroughly to deserve his wretched life, and she wanted, meanly, to make him see the actual squalid shape of it.
“Yes, that’s me. Though if one has to be any particular kind of daughter these days, that’s the kind to be. Don’t you agree?”
He agreed, with a sufficient sense of having been deflated. He knew what she meant. She meant she had money and he did not, and that this was a superior advantage to being of the advantaged sex.
“My name is Boadicea,” she informed him, seeming to offer, briefly, her hand, but then, before he could respond, reaching for her drink.
“Boadicea,” he repeated, changing every vowel.
“My friends call me Bo, or sometimes Boa.”
Among a certain class this would have been enough. But he was certainly not of that class, nor ever would be, though it was clear from the way his eyes were fixed on her now, that the wish lingered on.
“And my father calls me Bobo.” She sighed theatrically. “It is hard to go through life with such a peculiar name, but my father is a fanatical Anglophile, as was his father before him. Both Rhodes scholars! I’m fairly sure my brother won’t be though. His name is Serjeant, and my sister’s is Alethea. I’m lucky, I suppose, that I wasn’t christened Brittania. Though as to nicknames, then I’d have had a choice between Brit and Tania. Do you like England?”
“I’ve been there, but only on business.”
“Does business lift you up so far, then, that liking simply doesn’t enter in?”
“Well, it rained most of the time I was there, and the hotel I stayed in was so cold I had to wear my clothes to bed, and there was food rationing then, which is why I was sent there to begin with. But aside from that I guess I liked it well enough. The people were friendly, the ones I had to deal with.”
She looked at him with a blank smile, and sipped the pink lady, which had begun to seem cloying. From marveling at the elegance and bitchery of what she’d just said she hadn’t taken in a word of his.
“I find,” he said resolutely, “that people usually are, if you let ’em.”
“Oh, people… yes. I think so too. People are wonderful. You’re wonderful, I’m wonderful, and the steward has wonderful red hair, though not as wonderful by half as my father’s. I have a theory about red hair.”
“What’s that?”
“I believe it’s a sign of spiritual distinction. Swinburne had intensely red hair.”
“Who was Swinburne?”
“The greatest poet of Victorian England.”
He nodded. “There’s Dolly Parsons too. Her hair’s pretty red.”
“Who’s Dolly Parsons?”
“The faith-healer. On tv.”
“Oh. Well, it’s only a theory.”
“Some of the things she does are pretty incredible too. A lot of people really believe in her. I’ve never heard anyone else say it was her hair though. I’ve got a cousin out in Arizona — he’s got red hair and says he hates it. He says people are always ribbing him about it, give him funny looks.”
She felt, as she was listening to the steady unreeling of his witless well-meaning speech, as if she had mounted a carousel, which was now revolving too fast for her to get off. The plane had canted several degrees to the left. The sun had moved noticeably higher in the west, so that its light made vast semaphores on the heaving waves, from which the clouds had all been wiped away.