Chapter 12
12
On Monday, I felt anxious as I ventured to Acuity, my stress levels heightened by my unresolved conflict with Karina. I was relieved when she sat at her usual terminal next to mine, hinting that not all was lost. She smiled at me distantly and went about her sanitizing routine.
At lunch, her curiosity got the better of her. “Okay, Linda,” she said. “Let’s hear about this guy you left the club with.”
I glanced fearfully at the humming microwave, inside which my egg rolls revolved. Dave himself might be stationed in a surveillance room within the parent company’s headquarters, awaiting my answer.
“He was in his late twenties, stocky, with a beard,” I said, aiming to describe the fictive man as the opposite of Dave.
Karina considered this over a spoonful of yogurt. “How’d it all go down?”
“We danced together after you left to get us drinks,” I said. The microwave dinged. I retrieved my paltry lunch and joined Karina at the table.
“Yeah, sorry I dropped the ball on that,” she said. “Beatrice showed up, and everything went downhill from there.”
I affected surprise, though I’d witnessed Beatrice myself. “Did you confront her?”
“No. I mean, I don’t even know the girl. I just acted like a bitch to Anthony all night.”
Again, I regretted leaving Karina at the club. I could have at least served as an absorbent surface onto which she could pour her feelings. Historically, I’d been so focused on planes, I neglected my human relationships. With Karina, I’d hoped to do things differently, proving that I was capable of being a good friend.
“I’m really sorry I left,” I said. “That was selfish of me.”
“No, you were fine,” she said, to my surprise. “It all worked out for the best. The next morning, I told Anthony I’d looked at his messages, and he was shocked I’d been tripping off Beatrice. It’s like you said. She has a crush on him, but he thinks she’s annoying. He didn’t invite her to the club. She follows his T-shirt account, so she saw the flyer there.”
“I knew it,” I said, happy that Anthony had been vindicated.
“We worked some things out. We talked about all the feelings we’d both been having since getting engaged, and I think we’re in a better place now. We even set a date for the wedding! August eighteenth.”
I congratulated her. I was glad Karina’s vision board was bearing fruit, which further bolstered my belief in their power.
“Can you make it?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, honored that she would invite me to attend such a momentous occasion. I’d only been to one wedding before, my brother’s. It was two years ago, shortly after I’d moved out of Al’s house in Bakersfield and come to live in San Francisco. The ceremony was held outdoors, at a ranch in San Luis Obispo, Denise’s hometown. The ranch was positioned near the SLO airport, and I was distracted by planes flying low overhead. The roar of one plane’s engines disrupted Al’s vows. He paused, grimacing at the sky, and the assembled guests chuckled, as if it were all a grim joke about the modern world. I sensed the plane was imparting a message to me, a promise that my own wedding day would soon arrive. At the reception, I caught the bouquet.
Karina scraped her spoon along the yogurt container’s inner wall. “So what happened with your guy? Did you go back to his place, or what?”
“Yeah, back to his place in SoMa,” I said. I’d devised a cover story over the weekend, even choosing a building for my fictional paramour to reside in. “He lives at the Harrison.”
“I know that building. He must be loaded. What does he do?”
“Something in tech,” I said, shrugging.
“So what happened? Did you, you know…?” She mouthed the word “fuck.”
“We fooled around a bit,” I said quietly, wincing at the memory of Dave’s fingers inside me.
“You should be careful, Linda. I’m glad it worked out, but going home with a stranger is dangerous.”
“I know. I was caught up in the moment.”
“Next time, at least tell me you’re leaving, and drop a pin when you get to his place.”
I was touched by her concern. She asked if I’d see him again, and I said, truthfully, that it seemed like a one-time thing. I hoped Dave and I could move on, pretending nothing had happened. Before we’d parted ways at SFO, he insisted we exchange phone numbers, in case something came up, though I couldn’t imagine what that would be.
“What’s his name?” Karina asked.
“Stewart,” I said. I’d chosen this name after Payne Stewart, the famous golfer who’d died in a ghost plane incident.
Simon entered the break room. He must have been listening to our conversation, as the first thing he said was, “Linda got some dick?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
“Must have been a lame lay. Figures, with a name like Stewart.” Simon went to the freezer and shook the last four egg rolls in the box onto a plate.
“You shouldn’t use them all up,” I said. “We won’t get more until August.”
“I’m starving,” Simon said.
“Linda’s right,” Karina said. Simon, chastened, replaced two of the rolls in the box. Karina and I exchanged a withering look at Simon’s expense, and I was relieved that our friendship seemed back on solid footing.
—
All week, I braced myself for professional fallout from our flight to Houston. I feared Dave would want me gone from Acuity, simply so he wouldn’t have to see me and be reminded of what he’d revealed on the plane. It wasn’t being fingered that doomed me. It was Dave’s confession about his failed marriage and mental health struggles that marked me as a dangerous presence. I worried he’d seek to terminate my employment on some flimsy pretense, perhaps a failure to adhere to the dress code. As such, I dressed with more care than usual and conducted myself as a model employee.
Wednesday, on my wellness break, I was pleased to find the yoga ball fully inflated. Dave must have followed through on my request, which he’d noted on his iPad and ignored until this week. I saw an opportunity to normalize our relationship, reverting to our roles of supervisor and subordinate. I texted him, Thanks for inflating the ball! —Linda.
Dave replied immediately: No problem, Linda! How’s your week going?
I told him it was going fine, and he “liked” the message, concluding our brief exchange. I wondered if our flight together hadn’t been such a big deal, after all. I recalled there was a section in the employee handbook discouraging employees from dating each other, but in spite of this prohibition, several mods had struck up relationships in my time here, exchanging sexual favors in the single-occupancy restroom. Christa must have been aware of these activities, but she’d looked the other way, as she did for most things that happened at our center. I gathered the rules might be different when it came to a manager from the parent company engaging in a sex act with a moderator, but Dave had more to lose than I did. I could claim he’d coerced me into a perverse, pointless flight to Houston, and he’d be sanctioned, perhaps even fired. In my relative powerlessness, I held some power over Dave, which he must have realized.
But I had no interest in claiming Dave had victimized me, when in truth I’d been the aggressor, having wielded the universe’s infinite power to entice him to fly with me. I was the real pervert, while he was simply a heterosexual man who’d been duped into caressing a woman’s genitals in an unusual setting. I was gripped by a familiar shame, the force that had kept me in check all these years, hiding my true nature from everyone in my life. I regretted having told Dave about my attraction to planes, though luckily he hadn’t taken me seriously. I wished I could tell Karina about my weekend trysts and have her inquire about my lovers with the same curiosity she’d shown regarding the man I’d left the club with. But it was pointless to dwell in this fantasy. It could never be.
I’d revealed my desire only one other time, to my mom, over lunch at the Cheesecake Factory when I was fourteen. It was a year after my awakening on board N92823. As my family unraveled, I’d sought refuge in fantasy, spending most of my time in my room, pleasuring myself to plane content on my long-suffering iMac. I’d never heard of anyone being attracted to planes, but I held out hope that it was a harmless quirk of sexuality, the way some people were attracted to crooked teeth or hairy chests. I decided to ask my mom about it, in a roundabout way. I figured discussing romance might bring us closer; our relationship had been strained since she’d refused to let my dad move back in. Perhaps I also wanted to shock her, asserting that I’d moved beyond her control.
As we waited for our salads, I said, “Planes are kind of beautiful, don’t you think?”
She fiddled with her napkin. “You and your dad always seemed to think so. Planes and boats.”
“Boats are his thing,” I said, already irritated. “I only like planes.”
“I thought you didn’t like them anymore.”
It was true that I’d said this, though it was only because talking about planes with my dad now made me queasy. I’d missed our plane-spotting excursions, but I could no longer allow them, as I was horrified by the possibility of becoming aroused while in his company.
I pressed on, wanting to shake my mom out of her complacency. “Do you ever feel excited when the plane is taking off?” I said. “Like, you know you’re about to be miles up in the air, and something could go wrong, and there’s nothing you can do about it? And you have to let go and hope for the best?”
My mom raised her eyebrows. “I wouldn’t call it exciting,” she said. “I’m mostly glad when it’s over.”
“Like our flight to Chicago last year,” I said. “I felt like the plane was trying to tell me something. Like it wanted us to crash, so we could be together, forever. Does that sound crazy?”
Our salads arrived. My mom speared a stack of romaine with her fork. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Linda. People will think there’s something funny about you.”
In the weeks after, I felt my mom watching me as I watched TV in the living room or stood at the kitchen counter pouring a glass of orange juice. She pestered me about whether there were any boys I liked at school. “Or girls?” she added, seeming proud of herself for allowing this possibility. Weren’t my friends dating now? They were, and my peers asked me the same questions, in more caustic tones, until I invented a crush on a boy named Caleb who sat beside me in Spanish class and was gentle and shy to the point of near muteness. I could have used Caleb as a cover with my mom, too, but I resented her prying. I said it was none of her business, and eventually, she stopped asking. The possibility of true intimacy between us had foreclosed when she dismissed my revelation at the Cheesecake Factory. We’d since settled into a friendly but superficial relationship, like strangers chatting in the boarding group line.
—
By Friday, I’d received no sinister coded missives from Christa, nor from Scott, nor from Dave himself, and I hoped the threat had passed. As my vigilance waned, my desire to fly resurged. I worried the planes would be offended that I’d flown with Dave, and especially that I’d invited him to penetrate me on board N14249. I longed to fly again, to show them that Dave had meant nothing. I decided to wait until the end of the month, however, so the universe would not deem me a glutton and withhold its favor. Instead, I headed to the Elephant Bar after work.
I was dismayed to find the establishment more crowded than I’d ever seen it. The Golden State Warriors were playing a pivotal game, and the bar was clustered with spectators, drinking beer and gazing at screens placed above the liquor bottles. Additionally, a large party was assembled at a long table in the restaurant’s interior, evidently a birthday gathering, judging from the balloons tied to the chair of the young woman who sat at the table’s head. Jose stood at the host stand, frowning at his lighted screen—I realized he was a kind of air traffic controller of the restaurant, which made me feel a grudging respect for him. I considered walking away before he saw me, sparing myself humiliation, as the booths were all occupied, and I suspected that Jose was in no mood for our usual dance.
But before I could leave, Jose glanced up from the screen. When he saw me, his eyes flared with malice.
“Party of two?” I said out of habit.
“Are you sure about that?” Jose said. “Because you’ve been coming here for a year, and your friend never shows up.”
I felt so humiliated, I longed for violence to be done to me. I imagined being hit by a car, my head knocked cleanly off my torso, like a Lego person. “I’m sorry,” I said.
Jose’s shoulders softened. “No, I’m sorry, that was so rude of me,” he said. “Do you want to sit at the bar, hon? It’s not a good night for booths, I’m afraid.”
I mumbled, “That’s okay,” and fled next door to the Marriott, where I locked myself in a restroom stall. Jose’s rejection felt like a message from the universe. I’d erred by drawing Dave into my intimacy with planes, as though I’d been experimenting with polyamory, which Dave said he’d always wanted to try. But I was a monogamist at heart, as I assumed planes were, too. I’d betrayed myself and my soulmate plane, and now I was being punished.
After a few minutes, I composed myself and emerged into the Marriott lounge, whose hostess cheerfully led me to a table along the gridded windows. I ordered fries, which were okay, but not as good as the Elephant Bar’s. Through the window, a plane glided in for landing. His main landing gear, two sets of tires placed along his broad hips, touched down first. His nose remained aloft for a moment, taking in the night air, before gently lowering, his delicate nose gear kissing the runway. My chest flooded with longing. I turned from the window, feeling I did not deserve to gaze upon such an immaculate creature.