Airplane Rides (2 page)

I never thought much about religion again, except for the
occasional news blurb reminding me that the Catholic Church was an organization
of misguided priorities designed primarily to perpetuate membership (the Pope
encouraging teenagers not to use condoms readily comes to mind).  Instead I
quickly became a non-practicing half believer of God, not giving a second
thought to any of the minor league sins, and rationalizing that a quick stop to
a confessional booth somewhere near the end of my run would surely clean enough
of my slate to get me a spot on the elevator going up.

And so it was until one early afternoon in Chicago following an
airport interview with a young lawyer who aspired to “benefit from my
mentorship.”  One had to laugh at the sound of it, as it was like asking Robert
Downey Jr. for career counseling.  We met for coffee at an airport bar prior to
my flight back to New York following a day that was otherwise filled with the
typical bullshit of selling people on doing what was generally in my favor.  By
4:30 that afternoon, between the meetings and the interview, I was all sold
out.  There was not a scrap of dignity left.

With time to kill, I went from the interview bar to a smaller
drinking establishment closer to my gate and hid behind a pair of dark
oversized Ray-Ban glasses that I had pulled from my suit breast pocket. I
mumbled something about a glass of vodka to the bartender and laid a ten-dollar
bill on the black Formica bar top.  The cold liquid ran down my throat,
soothing the panic that was quietly overwhelming me. I could feel my eyes relax
a tick and I felt a bit more in control, at least to the extent that I had the
glass to hang onto. I dared a look at the eyes of the bartender through the
dark glasses, an older man with a bright-balled nose, bushy eyebrows and bushy
ears to match.  He returned my glance with a crooked smile that suggested we
had already met and that he was waiting for me to recognize him as if we were
partners of sorts – the seller and the buyer, the server and the served, the
tempter and the tempted.

Feeling uncomfortably transparent, I turned away, leaning with
my back against the bar and my drink in my hands.  O’Hare was one of the newer
of the mall airports back then, an assembly of familiar retailers, clustered
between airline gates, helping travelers feel comfortable while in strange
cities by filling their waiting time between destinations the same way that
they fill their waiting time at home – consuming.  I eyed the other travelers
as they hurried to their airplanes, some dragging their luggage, a few dragging
small children who in turned carried their own brightly colored little
suitcases with pictures of their favorite cartoon characters.  Easier to face
the bartender, I turned back around away from the children and took a long draw
on the drink, closing my eyes as I did so and washing the children’s innocence
from my mind. I knew their destination, and there was nothing I could do about
it.

When I opened my eyes, the bartender was in front of me,
smiling his rotten-toothed smile and stinking like the desk clerk at a seedy
peepshow joint.

“Another?” he asked, ready to pour the bottle he held forward
as if he knew I needed it.

“Not today.”

My response was laced with the assertion that I might still be
in charge of the partnership I didn’t belong to.  I picked up my case off the
adjoining barstool and walked toward the gate, leaving the change on the bar
and sure that I could hear the bartender laughing at me from behind.

A groan in my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything
that day.  I could feel myself squinting to compensate for a throbbing that was
slowly building in my temples and stretching around to the back of my eye
sockets. I backtracked a hundred or so feet to a gift store and bought a bottle
of aspirin, a role of antacids and a large bottle of water, sampling each of
them before actually paying the nineteen-year-old overweight, underpaid child
whose lifeless eyes never noticed me but indicated beyond any reasonable doubt
that her fate had already been sealed by a fatherless child, an abusive parent,
an absent education or maybe all of the above.

By the time I finally reached the gate, first and business
class passengers were boarding. I made my way up, water bottle under my arm,
briefcase in one hand and boarding pass in the other.  The gate attendant
smiled at me, ripping my boarding pass perfectly across the perforated line
without taking her eyes off my sunglass armor.  In the moment, I took her in.
Her eyes were deep pools of brown, probably darker because of my glasses, as
was her hair, tied back behind her head with a dark blue ribbon in a loose
ponytail.  She reminded me of another woman, causing the echo of a faint memory
in my heart. I felt an urgency to say something redeeming to her, but I knew
she wouldn’t understand. The opportunity was lost, and our connection limited
to the touch of our fingers on the passing of my boarding stub.

The cocktail was stirring my libido and blurring my sense of
reason enough to contemplate turning around and suggesting to her I stay the
night in town where we could navigate the intricacies of our respective
charades over dinner.   While my mind stopped to consider the possibilities, my
shoes didn’t and instead carried me further into the cavernous jetway, similar
in feel to the Saint Mary’s corridor.  I pushed through the more patient types
to find my seat in an empty row in the far aisle of the business class
section.  I settled in next to the window, stowed my case under the seat in
front of me and immediately waved to get the attention of the flight attendant
who was doing aisle laps with a tray of water and champagne.  I talked my way
into a second vodka rocks that I used to wash down another three aspirin.

Using my finger, I extracted the largest of the ice cubes from
the glass and held it to my temples, first the right and then the left. The ice
cube melted and tiny drops of water ran down my cheeks, which I casually
brushed away with the pinky finger on my same hand.  I closed my eyes tight in
an attempt to squeeze the headache and the image of the gate attendant from my
head, all along working the ice cube until it had completely dissolved. 
Exhausted, eyes still closed, my wet fingered hand dropped to my lap and my
mind was free to ask the question I kept avoiding.

My solitude was disrupted by the feeling of a large presence to
my left and confirmed by a weighted descent on the seat next to me, far too
large to be an acceptable distraction. I pretended to sleep behind my
sunglasses, avoiding any possibility of having to endure pleasantries.   When I
did finally open my eyes, I met the stare of a large Orthodox Jewish man whose
eyes were as black as the unruly hair that continued down his sideburns into a
full beard. The man’s stare shifted disapprovingly between my face and the
half-finished cocktail balancing on the armrest that separated us.  I realized
he was looking at the watermarks on my face and had assumed they were tears. I
further presumed that his glance at the glass was his judgmental way of letting
me know that the remedy for my sorrow could not be found at the bottom.  I
wanted to tell him to fuck off and take his act to a different row, but instead
I picked up the glass and defiantly gulped down the remaining liquid.  The man
smiled to let me know that he was not intimidated by the performance, exhaled a
sigh of what sounded like pity and turned his attention to a copy of the Talmud
that he pulled from a black oversized leather accountant’s case.

I shifted slightly and from behind my glasses I inconspicuously
eyed him. He too wore black, but his suit was three-pieced and he wore no tie
under his wrinkled white collar. His hands were thick like the rest of him, and
I noticed they were chapped and darkened with newspaper ink.  I guessed him in
his mid-fifties, as everything about him looked that age with the exception of
his youthfully bright and full red lips that I suspected had been shielded
through the years by his overgrown mustache.

The flight attendant passed for a final check, taking with her
my empty glass as the last of the stragglers buckled in for takeoff.

As the airplane ascended I looked out the window and breathed
my own sigh of relief, the distance between me and the earth growing to several
hundred feet, then several thousand, until finally I was once again lost above
the great white expanse of the clouds. As the direct rays of the sun warmed me,
I began to feel that somewhere in that peaceful and timeless space I might
remember who I was.   I thought I might be forgiven for the lies I’d told,
forgiven by the innocents I had seduced, forgiven for having left the gate
attendant’s smile unanswered as I did the woman with whose heart I was careless
with years before.  Once forgiven, I could forgive those who had taught me
life’s harder lessons.  This high in the sky, temporarily absolved, I could
forgive them all, even the judgmental man who was sharing my ride.

“You don’t mind if I eat, do you?”

His question breaking the silence while untying a knot in a
light blue plastic shopping bag that he had pulled out from his case.

I responded with a silent thumbs up at which he pulled from the
bag a few paper napkins, a white plastic fork and an rectangular Tupperware
container full to the brim with what looked like leftover shredded roast
chicken, carrots, potatoes and peas.

“They always forget my meal,” he informed me in between bites
and waving a hand in the air to get the attention of the flight attendant.

Upon her arrival he requested a glass of water and continued,
compelled to explain. “So after not eating a few times, I started bringing my
own,” completing the thought while carefully selecting a small morsel of
chicken.

Technically there was no question, so I offered no response, my
earlier thumbs up the only indication that I was conscious behind my Ray-Bans.

The man was unshaken at my mildly rude election for silence,
and continued undeterred.

He told me his name was Max Singer as he wiped his right hand
with the paper napkin and jutted it forward to shake mine.

Realizing the inevitable I gave his hand a quick shake and
shared with him my first name.

“Tough day?”

He motioned to the plastic fork to the empty space where my
vodka glass had been.

“Not at all,” I responded, trying to work the hoarseness out of
my voice.

Max smiled at me a smile that suggested he knew better, but he
did not prod further.  For a few moments he ate, his mannerisms as graceful and
flawless as if he were dining in a three-star restaurant rather than a crowded
airplane.

“Where are you from?”

Wondering if there was still any chance of avoiding
conversation, I was half inclined to point my thumb east out the window but
refrained, admitting to myself that his relentless nature was a pleasant
distraction.

“New York,” I replied and dared to ask the same.

Max told me that he was also from New York and, as expected, it
didn’t end there. He proudly told me he was a printer, that he was married and
had three children, two boys and a girl. Both boys worked with him, and the
girl was still in school. I didn’t ask, but I assumed that meant high school.
He talked as though we were old friends, filling me in on how his life had
turned out, but without any common memories to share. Out of what seemed like
sincere interest rather than conversational etiquette, he began to ask about my
life.  In response, I did what I always had in such instances, and told a story
about someone else.

“Here’s one for you Max,” I began, sounding as though I were
about to pose a riddle, not realizing at the time I cared about the answer.

“A while back, I was coming in from Kennedy in one of those
sedan limos.  The driver was a man named Jonas who, like you, was an Orthodox
Jew. I noticed Jonas was very upset and I asked him why.  He told me that his
entire family was distraught because Jonas’s sister Jordana had fallen in love,
was living with and planned on marrying a man who wasn’t Jewish.”

Max listened intently, pursing his red lips and nodding as I
spoke, conveying empathy for Jonas’s dilemma.  I continued with the story,
telling him that Jordana had been banished from the family and that no one was
talking to her with the exception of Jonas, who was trying desperately to
convince her to break off the relationship and return home.

“Almost nine months later,” I continued, “fate would have it
that I was on my way back to Kennedy, and once again Jonas was my driver. I
remembered his face in the rear view mirror and inquired if Jordana had gone
forward with the marriage. Jonas was surprised and appreciative that I had
remembered him, but sadly told me that Jordana had married the man and that he
too had broken communications.”

Finished with the story, I waited for Max’s reaction, which he
did not immediately offer. His expression was troubled and pensive.

“Very sad,” said Max.

“Well, do you think it wrong that the family excommunicated
her?”

“It’s not wrong at all,” stated Max without hesitation. “She
betrayed her family.”

“Betrayed? How so?”

“She married outside her faith.”

“Ok, but don’t you think it a little harsh that they disown
her?”

“Not at all.”

Perhaps my story had caused him to lose his appetite, or perhaps
he believed the subject warranted his full attention.  Whatever the case, Max
pulled the Tupperware lid from the plastic bag and fit it carefully back on the
container like someone might remove their eyeglasses before a fistfight.

“What is your religion?” he asked.