Airplane Rides (3 page)

“I’m not very religious.”

“You were raised an atheist?”

“No. Catholic.”

“So you are a Catholic.”

“My name is on the guest list but I’m not sure I am still
invited.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“It’s probably a good hedge, but that’s not what we’re talking
about.”

“My apologies.”

“So you have a daughter,” I asked rhetorically. “If she married
someone who wasn’t Jewish...”

“An Orthodox Jew,” he corrected me.

“Fine, if she married someone who was not an Orthodox Jew, you
wouldn’t talk to her ever again?”

“Yes, and I would do all in my power to stop the marriage.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I would cut her off financially as well.  She would
take nothing forward from her life as my child.”

“How could you really do that? ” I asked, without giving him a chance
to answer before firing off another question.  “How could you not break down
and talk to her?”

“There would be no one to talk to because she would be dead to
me.”

I sat for a moment, studying Max’s face for a bluff. His dark
eyes were fixed on my glasses, and his bright red lips held together, giving no
indication of an explanation to come.

“How could you really do that to your child?”

“She will have done it to herself.”

“I have known people who have lost children Max, and my bet is
that they would tell you that that’s not dead.”

“No, she would be dead to me, dead to her family.”

I continued to stare, past his eyes and into his mind.  Max
stared back ready to defend the teachings of his faith and the words that he
spoke.  The aspirin and vodka were tearing me up from the inside out. I took
off my sunglasses, tucked them into the pocket of my jacket and rubbed hard at
the inner corners of my eyes with my fingers.

Inside my mind I laughed at my own incorrigible tendencies. I
was probably an inch   away from vomiting blood, and here I was taking on a
religious argument with an Orthodox Jew.

My mind shuffled through the Tuesday sessions for the
applicable lesson, the one that handled the question of what comes first: the
family or the church.  There had to be some military “God, Country, Corps” type
hierarchy to resolve it, but nothing came to mind. Turning back to face him, I
continued.

“But Max, isn’t the whole point of religion to bring family
together?”

“The point is to be closer to God.”

“And tearing apart your family brings you closer to God?”

“I am not tearing apart the family.  Jordana tore herself away
from her family, and in marrying outside her faith tore herself away from God.”

“But what she did was fall in love.”

“Her choice.”

“A person decides who they fall in love with?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said it was her choice,” I shot back.

“She has the choice of who not to fall in love with. She should
not have allowed herself to progress into love with someone not of her faith.”

“Progress romantically?”

Max nodded his head in solid affirmation.

“Hold on.”

I held up my hand thinking I had him but at that same moment I
experienced a wave of dizziness that caused me to loose focus.

“Are you alright?”

Max eyed me with concern.

“Must be a blood sugar thing.”

I tried to sound causal and brushed the air between us with the
back of my hand – the universal signal for no big deal.

Max hailed the flight attendant and asked for an orange juice.

“Thank you Max,” I said trying to get past the distraction. 
“Let’s suppose you are a young unmarried man working in an office somewhere,
and next to you sits a beautiful unmarried woman.”

Max smiled at my determination as the flight attendant arrived
with the orange juice. I emptied the plastic cup in a single tilt and wiped my
lip with the paper napkin that was stuck to the bottom.

“Perfect,” I said, feeling better almost instantly.  “So you
work next to her each and every day for a few years, and naturally learn about
each other’s lives.  You become great friends, sharing lunch, talking about
life, the whole meshugass.”

I paused for a moment, impressed with my own Yiddish, and was
met with another smile, which was sufficient encouragement for me to continue.

“Are you telling me that it would be impossible for you to fall
in love with that woman?”

“I would not allow myself to fall in love with her,” he
responded.

“How could you control that?” I asked.

“I would not allow my feelings to go in that direction,” he
replied.

“Come on, how can you control those kind of thoughts?”

“Discipline and devotion to my faith,” he replied calmly.

I paused for a moment and then pulled the airline magazine from
the seat pocket in front of me, turning the pages until I came upon a
photograph of Michelle Pfeiffer.  Under the general premise that people, even
Orthodox Jews, want what they can’t have, and not recalling having met very
many blond Orthodox Jews who looked like Michelle, I showed him the picture.

“OK, you know who that is?” I asked.

“Michelle Pfeiffer,” he answered obviously pleased with
himself.

“Do you find her attractive?”

“Of course I do.”

“So if she were sitting here with you instead of me, would you
converse with her?”

“I suppose if she were interested in talking with me,” he
responded.

“I didn’t want to talk but that didn’t stop you.”

Max blushed and returned the smile.

“I think I would be a little more intimidated by her,” he said
proudly.

“Fine. Let’s say she was interested in talking to you and in
the conversation you determined her to be an incredibly kind, interesting and
sexy woman. Do you think it possible you would be drawn to her?” I asked him.

“Perhaps, but that does not mean I would allow myself to fall
in love with her inside a couple of hours of conversation,” he said smiling
through his answer.

“OK,” I conceded, “but what if you were a photographer instead
of a printer, and you worked with her frequently and for time periods beyond
the duration of this flight? Wouldn’t the possibility of falling for her
increase?”

Max placed his hands together on his lap, intertwining his
ink-stained fingers, and exhaled as if to find the patience to help me through
my ignorance.

“I assume because you wear no wedding band that you are not
married, correct?” he asked, to which I nodded in agreement.

“Have you ever been married?” he further inquired.

I replied that I had not, but in my weakened state he caught a
hesitation in my voice that compelled him to dig further.

“Perhaps you were engaged or were in some sort of serious
relationship?” he asked, lifting his bushy eyebrows.

“Perhaps,” I returned, offering no more.

“And in that relationship, perhaps you were faithful?”

“Perhaps.”

“So while you were engaged, you did not fall in love with
another woman?” Max asked with a smile, as if I was about to be checkmated.  I
paused for a moment, cautious with my response.

“No, I didn’t fall in love with anyone else,” I replied,
telling him more than he had asked for, the words to my surprise catching in my
throat.

I faked a cough to conceal the emotion and scanned the aisle
for the flight attendant.  I could use another drink. Max didn’t allow me to
buy time with a distraction and closed in.

“So why did you not fall in love with another?  Because you
already had a love.”

Max hung there, one sentence away from the completion of his
argument.

“So why can’t the first love and commitment be to God,” I
stated, ungraciously stealing his opportunity to deliver his final blow.   Max
smiled at me, untangled his fingers and held his palms out as if offering me
invisible credit for having understood.

I conceded defeat with only a sigh, patted Max’s thick forearm
that lay on the armrest between us and raised the window shade to stare out at
the charcoal sky.  I drifted to earlier memories, silently peering into the
Saint Mary’s classrooms and then the old brick church itself.  I could see the
tall white doors that opened into the center aisle that I had walked, the
ornate ceiling murals and the beautiful stained glass windows that documented
the final hours of Jesus.  It all sure looked official, but I was certain they
had gotten it wrong, the priests, the sisters, Dolorous, Jonas and Max.  Never
mind the boring lectures, the yardstick beatings and undersized desks,
something had gone seriously amiss in the translation.  If God was out there
somewhere in the clouds, I was sure he was heavy with disappointment, muttering
something along the lines of, “No, that’s not what I meant at all.”

I thought to turn and try to explain that which was caught on
the tip of my brain, but I knew I wasn’t winning any arguments with Max this
evening.  No matter.  In the distance I could see the New York skyline,
illuminated in all of its glory.

“Still thinking?” Max asked from behind me.

“Yeah,” I said without turning around, finding a last burst of
optimistic fortitude in the glow of the city.  I laughed inside my mind at the
irony of the conversation, but more so at the possibility that perhaps my moral
compass might still be true.

“I was thinking that I enjoyed talking with you.”

UA Flight # 1287
San Francisco (SFO) to New York (JFK)

It was an early San Francisco morning, damp and quiet, and
being on East Coast time, an easy 7:00am flight to make.  The gate was bustling
with business types lining up for the trip, all looking alike in shades of
blue, gray and black.  I took my place with them, briefcase in one hand,
carry-on in the other, joining in the one-step-forward waltz.  Within several
minutes, the line had grown long behind me.  Sensing a wait, the woman
immediately ahead of me requested I save her place while she went for coffee,
offering me a cup in return. I agreed with a nod, figuring there was not much
to my end of the bargain beyond pushing her bag a few feet forward with each
dance step.  Soon she returned with two Starbuck’s in hand, wooden stir sticks
and sugar packets held out between her fingers.  As we slowly made our way
forward, we sipped the coffee and made small talk about traveling too much and
not sleeping well in hotel rooms.

She spoke in soft bursts over her shoulder, always with a
professional traveler’s eye on the head gate attendant over the top of her
coffee cup, which she held from the bottom, palm up.  She told me where she was
from, and that she was headed back, without referring to it as home.  I told
her that we were about to board my home, the truth hidden in sarcasm.   The
statement made her smile, which I learned she did with her eyes as much as her
mouth when she turned full around in a gesture of body language gratitude.

I took my first good look at her. Probably thirty-eight years
old, I thought, and made a mental note to guess thirty-four if it came up.  She
was a grown-up version of the pretty Catholic school type with soft features,
more angelic than adolescent. She carried her proportions well on her
five-foot-seven frame and had tightly curled amber hair and fair skin.  The
kind of woman, of which there are so many, that most preprogrammed men never
really notice until some unplanned moment unveils just how conducive her
physical characteristics are to time-stopping sex.  She was quick-witted, the
first sign of intelligence, yet had an easy way about her, returning the
earlier favor by making me smile as well.

Eventually, I reached the gate to beg for my upgrade. Soon
thereafter, I thanked the woman for the coffee and said goodbye.  She boarded
and I waited and watched anxiously for any last-minute full-fare types who
would bump me back into coach. Ten minutes before the seventh hour, I was given
the go-ahead and made my way to the only empty business class seat. It was an aisle
seat in a row of two, and as fate would have it my seatmate was the woman,
looking out the window and sipping the last of her coffee.

She smiled at my arrival and told me that our seating
assignments were a sign that our acquaintance was supposed to have significance
beyond the casual nature of the situation.  I smiled back, taking in the loaded
statement and wondering to myself which of us was the conversational predator. 
I followed her lead and gracefully twisted and turned on her the very questions
she raised, while yielding few words about myself.

Her name was Anne and she had married her high school
sweetheart James before she had turned 21.  James, a man still a boy, spent his
days reflecting on adolescent sporting victories and smoking enough pot to
forget just how much time had passed since.  She had known in her heart that
the marriage was a mistake well before she had made the vow, but James loved
her, her parents loved James, and she loved James’s parents.  Anne was very
good at doing what seemed right for everyone else.

Over the years, Anne’s life moved forward as James’s stood
still.  The chasm of resentment grew wide, yet remained unacknowledged. Without
surprise or contest, Anne was the family’s primary breadwinner, and when it
came time to bend to the parental calls for a grandchild, it was decided that
James would be a stay-at-home dad.  And so it was; Anne away on business trips
more and more frequently, while James, relieved from the burden of acceptable
interaction with the outside world, tended to his daughter, dragged out home
improvement tasks, and got high.

Anne’s attention to the needs of others, combined with her
responsible presence, served her well.  She quickly ascended to a CFO position
at a respected money management firm.  Single-handedly, she built the American
dreams of those around her, an effort secretly fueled by the escape from her
marriage that her corporate existence afforded her.  From airplanes and hotel
suites, on cell phones and from conference rooms, Anne was taking good care of
all of the reliant souls in her life: James, her daughter, parents, a sister
who got into trouble with an abusive husband, and, of course, the firm’s
investors.  But the more she gave, the less there was for herself, and each
effort drained her, like a glimmer of light emitted from a star high in the
heavens, slowly fading into the darkness around it.

Any nostalgic affection she had for James was gone – they
hadn’t slept together for years.  In an emotional and uncharacteristically illogical
attempt to fill the void, Anne decided to have another child, as the only pure
love she felt was for her daughter Emily, then six years old.  This decided,
the notion of romantic involvement with James had moved into the zone of
disgust, so instead she capitalized on the charade she had mastered.  She put
her life into application form and adopted a second child, distracting herself
from her own unhappiness with yet another person to take care of.

As she told me her story, her emptiness was so apparent that I
suspected a dangerous and desperate voice was sounding inside her heart.  And
on that realization, Anne’s prediction took form.  The significance of our
meeting hung there in front of me, exposed and crying for full discovery, and
perhaps better left explored by someone more responsible than I.   I made my
decision while climbing through the troposphere by asking the question that
would commence the journey; I asked her if she was having an affair.  Anne eyed
me for some time before answering, and I watched her expression go back and
forth between a criminal wondering how much I knew and a schoolgirl about to
burst from harboring too great a secret.

People create comfortably familiar patterns of behavior.  Roads
taken before, perhaps bumpy or misdirected but familiar just the same, and for
some, a critical juncture is reached and a change is made. Going from scrambled
to poached, vodka to scotch, victim to hero, each greater or lesser examples of
the same type of decision, “Do I leave what I know for something I expect that
I will enjoy more?” Anne had decided a short time before our airplane ride to
go from living for everyone else, to living for herself, a decision not yet
admitted, and reserved exclusively for the cities that she traveled to and the
anonymity she found there.  Embarked on her new path, she was now always on the
edge of temptation and slowly spinning out of control.  For whatever reason,
Anne decided I was the person to trust. She gave me the answer that I already
had.

While on business in Boston several weeks earlier, Anne had
stayed at the Ritz-Carlton. She had early meetings the following day, and used
the excuse to get out of the house a night early. Alone and without dinner
plans, she made her way to a nearby restaurant where she, as any professional
traveler would, took dinner at the bar.   It was there that she met Peter, an
attorney who worked his way into a scotch and a conversation. Peter had his own
marital problems.  He was two steps from divorce and two steps further into
functional alcoholism.  He was handsome, intelligent, successful, and his
problems weren’t hers.

Over a shared dessert and a third scotch, Peter opened the door
to infidelity, a place Anne had never been. Her only sexual partner in life had
been James, an act that hadn’t evolved much in the 20 years they’d been
together.  She had grown dependent on masturbating in her separate sleeping
quarters to mental images of men and women who for various reasons had stirred
her.  Peter’s proposal filled her with electricity, and the notion of catering
to the silent hunger that lurked within her made her feel indulgent and
reckless.  It did not matter who Peter was or what he looked like, he was
simply a bridge to a place that she needed to go, a place where she was no
longer a giver but rather a taker.  At that exact moment Anne surrendered for
the first time to the quiet but powerful sexual demon that exists within all of
us.

She had sex with Peter that evening at the Ritz-Carlton, but
the next morning, wrapped in her cocoon of guilt, thought her own behavior
dangerous and irresponsible.   By noon that same day, she began rationalizing
that it was probably important to have gotten it out of her system, mentally
labeling it a learning experience on the path to personal progress.  She threw
away Peter’s cell phone number, finished her meetings in Boston, got on another
airplane and fled from the city of her crime.  Two days later she got a short
voicemail from Peter simply requesting she return the call.  For two days she
left the message unanswered, but then contacted him while in Manhattan.  Both
in the city, Peter suggested a second rendezvous. Anne hesitated, but then
agreed to a drink. Three hours later they were alone in her room at the Waldorf
Astoria.

As we sat on the airplane, Anne recounting the episodes, she
explained how nervous being alone with a stranger had made her and yet how
exciting it was. The sex was raw and without emotion, baggage or concern.  All
the logic and reason that had previously fortified the line of infidelity no
longer seemed to matter. It had been so long since she felt impassioned, and
the encounter was like a long-awaited serum rushing through her veins. She was
alive again after all of these years, regardless of the consequences. Anne
confessed that she enjoyed performing oral sex on him, something she had never
enjoyed before. She enjoyed watching him reciprocate, something James had never
developed an aptitude, let alone passion for.

The transforming event for Anne was not her surrender in
Boston, but rather a vision that transfixed her in the room at the Waldorf.  A
large mirror, framed like a classical painting in golden wood, hung opposite
the bed. She lay on her back with Peter on top of her, both of them fully naked
and uncovered. Her arms were stretched out holding on backwards to the
headboard and her muscular legs flexed so as to prop up her pelvis.  When she
noticed her own reflection she was startled, at first not recognizing her own
expression. Shaken, she turned her attention to Peter.  His head was buried
face down above her shoulder, his arms wrapped around her torso and his body
finding a rhythm.

She found the courage to look into her own eyes attempting to
make sense of the stranger before her.  Her hair was wild, her cheeks were
heated and her lips were swollen.  But her eyes were what Anne found most
captivating: dark, insatiable black holes from which there was no escape.  She
was disturbed and yet perversely proud at the same time.  Anne the giver, the
responsible, the reliable, the accommodating, had just been given a mainline
shot of selfish abandon from which there was no return.

Her story had excited me, and I knew that I was walking too
close to the line from the moment I had questioned her fidelity.  Just one more
question, I had told myself as I pulled from her the secrets that she held: a
question, then another and then another. The savior and seducer that divided me
battled, while I listened, captivated by her answers.  I tried to convince
myself that I was not exploiting her weakness.  I rationalized that there was
nothing I was going to say that could help her; that she wanted to be seduced. 
Ultimately, I knew that it was hopeless and regardless of how close to heaven I
was, the earth below exerted its inevitable pull.

The airplane began its descent and I moved quickly to rouse the
stranger within her.  I could see her cheeks flush with a mix of embarrassment
and excitement.  I heard the weight of her breath.  No longer did I politely
avert my stare, less than fifteen inches away, which left her naked before me. 
Suddenly realizing her vulnerability, she made a futile attempt at escape and
turned the conversation to her desire to leave James, which was really more of
an incomplete plan to get him out of the house and into an apartment on his own
while maintaining some lesser version of their current existence.  I made her
admit that her drive to shed James was fueled by her desire to pursue the
fantasies she had logged through the years, hopes of being with other men and
perhaps women.  Again the blood returned to her cheeks as she nervously
adjusted her position in the seat, her eyes fixated on my expression that
foretold the inevitable.

“About to slide off your chair?” I said suggestively so that
only she could hear me.

Anne was not sure whether to be embarrassed or turned on.

“There is a cure for that.”

I smiled at her and motioned to the dark blue airline blanket
that draped across her lap.  Anne looked at me with shock, studying my face in
an attempt to find out if I was serious. I permitted the evaluation and held my
ground with an unflinching stare, determined to reset the boundaries of Anne’s
awakening.

Anne glanced around and pulled the blanket neck high,
readjusted her seat and closed her eyes in a manner designed to feign sleep.  A
moment of fiddling under the blanket, followed by an occasional pursing of her
engorged lips, paired with the ever-so-faint increase in her breathing, were
the only hints of what was going on. About every fifteen or twenty seconds, she
opened her eyes to make sure I was paying attention, which I was while
simultaneously standing watch, waving off the occasional flight attendant
offering a final water, wine or chocolate.  Anne shifted her position towards
me so that she could whisper across the armrest. Her eyes were half closed and
her hands still buried under the blanket.