A waitress wearing a yellow dress with a cute white apron took our order for a couple cups of coffee and then went off to get them. She was pretty but Vida made her pale.
We looked out the window to see aeroplanes coming and going, joining San Francisco to the world and then taking it away again at 600 miles an hour.
There were Negro men in white uniforms doing the cooking while wearing tall white hats, but there were no Negroes in the restaurant eating. I guess Negroes don’t take aeroplanes early in the morning.
The waitress came back with our coffee. She put the coffee on the table and left. She had lovely blonde hair but it was to no avail. She took the menu with her: good-bye, good morning.
Vida knew what I was thinking because she said, ‘You’re seeing it for the first time. It really used to bother me until I met you. Well, you know all about that.’
‘Have you ever thought about going into the movies or working here at the airport?’ I said.
That made Vida laugh which caused a boy about twenty-one years old to spill his coffee all over himself and the pretty waitress to rush a towel over to him. He was cooking in his own coffee.
It was time now to catch our aeroplane, so we left the restaurant. I paid a very pretty cashier at the front of the cafe. She smiled at me as she took the money. Then she looked at Vida and she stopped smiling.
There was much beauty among the women working in the terminal, but Vida was chopping it down almost as if it weren’t even there. Her beauty, like a creature unto itself, was quite ruthless in its own way.
We walked to catch our plane causing people in pairs to jab each other with their elbows to bring the other’s attention to Vida. Vida’s beauty had probably caused a million black and blue marks: Ah, de Sade, thy honeycomb of such delights.
Two four-year-old boys walking with their mother suddenly became paralysed from the neck up as they passed us. They did not take their eyes off Vida. They couldn’t.
We walked down to the PSA pre-flight lounge stimulating pandemonium among the males our path chanced to cross. I had my arm around Vida, but it wasn’t necessary. She had almost totally overcome the dread of her own body.
I had never seen anything like it. A middle-aged man, perhaps a salesman, was smoking a cigarette as we came upon him. He took one look at Vida and missed his mouth with the cigarette.
He stood there staring on like a fool, not taking his eyes off Vida, even though her beauty had caused him to lose control of the world.
PSA
The jet was squat and leering and shark-like with its tail. It was the first time I had ever been on an aeroplane. It was a strange experience climbing into that thing.
Vida caused her usual panic among the male passengers as we got into our seats. We immediately fastened our seat belts. Everybody who got on the aeroplane joined the same brotherhood of nervousness.
I looked out the window and we were sitting over the wing. Then I was surprised to find a rug on the floor of the aeroplane.
The walls of the aeroplane had little California scenes on them: cable cars, Hollywood, Coit Tower, the Mount Palomar telescope, a California mission, the Golden Gate Bridge, a zoo, a sailboat, etc, and a building that I couldn’t recognize. I looked very hard at the building. Perhaps it was built while I was in the library.
The men continued to stare at Vida, though the aeroplane was filled with attractive stewardesses. Vida made the stewardesses invisible, which was probably a rare thing for them.
‘I really can’t believe it,’ I said.
‘They can have it all if they want it. I’m not trying to do anything,’ Vida said.
‘You’re really a prize,’ I said.
‘Only because I’m with you,’ she said.
Before taking off a man talked to us over the plane’s PA system. He welcomed us aboard and told us too much about the weather, the temperature, clouds, the sun and the wind and what weather waited for us down California. We didn’t want to hear that much about the weather. I hoped he was the pilot.
It was grey and cold outside without any hope for the sun. We were now taking off. We started moving down the runway, slow at first, then faster, faster, faster: my God!
I looked at the wing below me. The rivets in the wing looked awfully gentle as if they were not able to hold anything up. The wing trembled from time to time ever so gently, but just enough to put the subtle point across.
‘How does it feel?’ Vida said. ‘You look a little green around the edges.’
‘It’s different,’ I said.
A medieval flap was hanging down from the wing as we took off. It was the metal intestine of some kind of bird, retractable and visionary.
We flew above the fog clouds and right into the sun. It was fantastic. The clouds were white and beautiful and grew like flowers to the hills and mountains below, hiding with blossoms the valleys from our sight.
I looked down on my wing and saw what looked like a coffee stain as if somebody had put a cup of coffee down on the wing. You could see the ring stain of the cup and then a big splashy sound stain to show that the cup had fallen over.
I was holding Vida’s hand.
From time to time we hit invisible things in the air that made the plane buck like a phantom horse.
I looked down at the coffee stain again and I liked it with the world far below. We were going to land at Burbank in Los Angeles in less than an hour to let off and pick up more passengers, then on to San Diego.
We were travelling so fast that it only took a few moments before we were gone.
The Coffee Stain
I was beginning to love the coffee stain on my wing. Somehow it was perfect for the day: like a talisman. I started to think about Tijuana, but then I changed my mind and went back to the coffee stain.
Things were going on in the aeroplane with the stewardesses. They were taking tickets and offering coffee inside the plane, and making themselves generally liked.
The stewardesses were like beautiful Playboy nuns coming and going through the corridors of the aeroplane as if the aeroplane were a nunnery. They wore short skirts to show off lovely knees, beautiful legs, but their knees and legs became invisible in front of Vida, who sat quietly in her seat next to me, holding my hand, thinking about her body’s Tijuana destination.
There was a perfect green pocket in the mountains. It was perhaps a ranch or a field or a pasture. I could have loved that pocket of green forever.
The speed of the aeroplane made me feel affectionate.
After a while the clouds reluctantly gave up the valleys, but it was a very desolate land we were travelling over, not even the clouds wanted it. There was nothing human kind below, except a few roads that ran like long dry angleworms in the mountains. Vida remained quiet, beautiful.
The sun kept swinging back and forth on my wing. I looked down beyond my coffee stain to see that we were flying now above a half-desolate valley that showed the agricultural designs of man in yellow and in green. But the mountains had no trees in them and were barren and sloped like ancient surgical instruments.
I looked at the medieval intestinal flap of the wing, rising to digest hundreds of miles an hour, beside my coffee stain talisman.
Vida was perfect, though her eyes were dreaming south.
The people on the other side of the aeroplane were looking down below at something. I wondered what it was and looked down my side to see a small town and land that looked gentler and there were more towns. The towns began magnifying one another. The gentleness of the land became more and more towns and grew sprawling into Los Angeles and I was looking for a freeway.