See You in Paradise (31 page)

“It was a UPS plane. The crew escaped, but all the packages were burned up. Guarantee my J.Crew stuff was in there.”

“I think it was a military transport. Some general or somebody got killed.”

“They saw it go down in the mountains but can’t get to it.”

“It was a private jet. I hope it was Bill Gates’s.”

I checked and double-checked my arrival and departure times in Minneapolis and the gate map in my on-flight magazine, trying to calculate the latest the plane could take off and still allow me to meet my connection. I saw myself sprinting down a crowded concourse, unencumbered by luggage, toward a far-flung terminal. Outside, men and women in dayglo jumpsuits zipped around on their little vehicles.

“There’s a massage station back on concourse B,” somebody said. “For fifteen bucks you can get a half-hour back rub. I ought to have done it.”

“In front of all Newark!”

“I’m not ashamed.”

We took off with apologies from the pilot at about the time we were supposed to have begun our descent into Minneapolis—Saint Paul. I fell asleep, ate dinner, fell asleep again, and disembarked in the muggy and lake-spangled Midwest.

“Flight 157 to Marshall?” I asked the ticket agent.

She laughed. “Long gone.”

“Put me on a later flight?”

“No such thing. I can get you out at nine fifteen tomorrow morning.”

“Will you get me a hotel room and a ride to it?”

She reached under the counter and pulled out a coupon: 10 percent off at the Super 8. “We can give you a discount,” she said. “No accommodations for weather delays, sorry.”

I refused the coupon. “I thought it was a crash. In Denver.”

“That was O’Hare. And I wouldn’t call it a crash.”

I persisted. Could I get out of Minneapolis that night? I didn’t know anyone in Minneapolis, and didn’t want to sleep huddled against the refrigerated terminal air on an ass-worn seat in the waiting area. She asked how about Seattle at 9:00 PM, then Marshall at 2:10 in the morning, and I said okay.

I had time to kill. The airport had a little mall, and the shops had themes: winter, health, wholesomeness. But it was August, and weary, begrimed travelers from all quarters haunted the unswept concourses. At something called High Plains Brewhouse I bought snob coffee and drank it over an abandoned
USA Today.
I read over and over, without comprehension, a graph charting the consumption of watermelon in America since 1954. I must have slept, because when I woke my flight was boarding.

Everyone on the plane to Seattle seemed to be drunk. They were possessed of an odd solidarity, as if they had all been friends for ages, though they lacked any common feature save their booze-fueled ruddiness and good spirits. I asked the slumped, frayed-looking woman sitting next to me what was going on. Her face fell into a happy leer as she remembered. “You see that guy?” she said.

“Him?” I was pointing to a thickset man wearing a big hat and waiting in line for the first-class bathroom a dozen rows ahead.

“He is a top-notch oil-and-gas lawyer from Fort Worth, Texas, and he has been buying us drinks for the last two and a half hours.” Apparently they had all been booked onto a flight scheduled to depart some time ago, but while taxiing their plane bumped a wing against a moveable ladder left out on the tarmac. Maintenance crews had to examine and possibly repair the damage. “They put us all on this flight, but we had to wait. So this guy gets up and says the drinks are on him. I put away a half-dozen margaritas with some high school teacher.” At that moment a bespectacled man wearing a loosened Mickey Mouse necktie shambled past and pointed at the woman with both hands. The two burst into giggles and the man moved on. “Oh, my,” she said.

“Did you hear about the crash in Denver?” I asked.

“That was in Omaha, I heard. You know, the plane was full of zoo animals from Africa, isn’t that terrible? Although no more terrible than a zoo. I believe they are inhumane, the zoos, not the animals. The animals ought to be let go.”

People were boarding the plane to cheers and applause, ducking in embarrassment or making jokes, exaggerating their drunkenness, staging pantomimed pratfalls. Nobody seemed to recognize specific seat assignments: they just stowed their carry-ons and stood around, as if at a cocktail party. Flight attendants touched their shoulders and spoke quietly and were met with roars of laughter.

In time, we took off. Passengers quieted, falling into boozy sleep. The new silence, backed by murmured conversations and the ambient rumble of the engines, reminded me of my mother’s hospital room, the sharp evening light softened through tan shades. She was telling two nurses a joke when I arrived. “So Moses says, ‘I’ll take a mulligan!’” They laughed together.

“Mom?” I said.

“Paulie!”

“How are you?”

The nurses bustled out past me, averting their eyes. “Actually, Paulie, I’m feeling much better.”

She looked like a party clown on a three-day weekend, her skin sallow from long days under makeup, her eyes tired and shifting.

“I’ll be out of here tomorrow,” she said.

“That’s great.” I riffled through the list of comforting phrases I’d compiled in my head. Had I misunderstood? Come right away, Paulie, she’d said, and I maxed out my credit card buying the ticket.

“Have you gotten your birthday present?” she asked me.

“No.”

“It’s coming. You’ll love it.”

“Terrific,” I said. “Thanks.” I wanted to sit down, though not necessarily here. The only furniture in the room was her bed and a nightstand, which a lamp shared with a paperback novel and her reading glasses. “Maybe I’ll go find a chair.”

“Why don’t you do that? Then we can talk.”

All along the ward I peered into rooms, looking for a free chair. There were a few, but the beds they stood by were occupied by sick people languidly manipulating their television remote controls or fitfully dozing. At the end of the hall I turned a corner and found an empty room. I went in. There was a neatly dressed bed, half-curtained and in shadow, and beyond it an unmade one under bright light. Two chairs were arranged at its foot. As I picked one up, preparing to carry it back, I noticed that the unmade bed was unmade because somebody was lying in it: a very old man with skin the color of Elmer’s glue. A discreet translucent tube was taped across his face, branching off into his nostrils, and he breathed in a rhythm so slow that I thought he must be in hibernation.

Except that his eyes were open. They were dark brown and brilliantly alive, like shiny coins half-buried on a desolate beach. He lifted his head—barely—and moved his lips. Words escaped in a whisper. I couldn’t understand them.

“I’m sorry?” I said, moving closer. “Sir?”

His hand had snaked out from under the sheet and he beckoned to me. I went to his bedside. “I didn’t mean to walk in like this,” I said. “I thought the room was empty.”

He shook his head, dismissing the apology. Closer, said his fingers. I brought my ear to his lips and smelled the bitter dryness of him, something like baking soda.

“Take it,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Take the chair,” he said. “Nobody’s using it.”

When I returned to my mother’s room with the chair, I discovered her chart hanging on a little hook outside her door: “Hemorrhoidectomy,” it said. Surgery performed by a Dr. Martinez, and a touch of codeine prescribed for the pain.

My flight to Marshall had been canceled. In fact, there was even some doubt it had ever existed. “I know we used to fly to Marshall at that time,” the ticket agent told me. “But I don’t think we have for quite a while.” His appearance put me briefly at ease; he wore his hair short and unkempt and he had a little black goatee: exactly the way young men in Seattle were supposed to look in 1995. I explained that I’d been booked on the flight; it had to exist. I gave him my name and he looked it up.

“You’re booked to fly to Madison, Wisconsin,” he said.

“Marshall. Marshall, Montana.”

He shook his head. “Look,” he said. “I can let you use the phone.” He reached beneath the counter and pulled out a receiver with a glowing keypad. “If you know anyone in town, have them come get you and bring you back in the morning. We’ll get you out of here then.”

“That’s all you’re giving me? A phone call?”

He frowned. “Take it or leave it,” he said.

Janine arrived in the same Ford Escort we’d shared when we lived together in Marshall. Idling, it made a new sound, as if a man were crouched under the hood sharpening a large knife. She leaned across the empty passenger seat and pushed open the door for me.

The back seat was full of cardboard boxes with what looked like all her winter clothes spilling out. She was wearing a Greek fisherman’s cap and a couple of large crystal pendants around her neck. I knew the hat but not the pendants.

“I really appreciate it,” I said. She eyed me with a kind of dispassionate destructiveness, as if I were a walnut she was about to crack open.

“There’s a patch of cold floor with your name on it,” she said.

“Well, thanks. It’s a far cry from the airport.”

She took a cigarette from a crumpled pack on the dash and stoked it with the lighter. Look! she was saying. You drove me back to smoking! We listened to music without speaking for most of the ride back to her place. It was a mix tape of some kind, a compilation of songs that were popular before we knew each other. “This is a good tape,” I said.

“Somebody made it for me.”

“I see.”

She put out her cigarette. “So where were you flying back from?” she asked. A car moved into traffic behind us, illuminating the interior, and our eyes met, reflected in the windshield.

“Newark. My mother was in the hospital. She’s better now.” I considered telling her the whole story, but she interrupted the pause to tell me that her sister, whom I’d totally forgotten had been sick for a long time with bone cancer, had finally died last month.

“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

She shrugged. “It was only a matter of time. There was a memorial service. Everybody read a little something they wrote. I know everybody says this, but she would have really loved it.”

“It sounds like—”

“In fact I suggested to her that we do something like it while she was still alive. It would be kind of a party, and her friends and all of us would be there, and we’d tell her how much we loved her and everything. But she would have none of it. She was too proud.”

We were silent for a little while. She clenched and unclenched her hands on the wheel. I tried to imagine what this would be like, hearing everyone telling you they love you, knowing that they can say nothing else, because you’re dying …

“That would have been very powerful,” I said.

“I don’t remember asking your opinion,” she came back.

Janine lived in the basement of some rich people. They had fixed things up pretty nicely down there—a terrific kitchen with a tile floor, a fold-down Murphy bed, and some built-in bookshelves—but none of it could dispel the gloom. The air was clammy. Shrill sounds emanated from a clock radio sitting on an upturned milk crate. Janine threw her coat on the bed. “I’ll get you a blanket,” she said, heading for a closet.