Chapter 19
19
In June, my mom invited me to her sixtieth birthday party. The event would be held in the backyard of my childhood home in Irvine, a week from Saturday.
I was on the bus when she called, commuting home on a Wednesday. I told my mom I wasn’t sure if I could make it, as things were busy at work. This was a lie, of course. The real conflict was that I couldn’t fly to Irvine given my vow of abstinence, and driving that distance alone seemed unfeasible. Aside from the expense of renting a car, I’d never driven more than ten miles at a time.
“I’d really love it if you could come, honey,” she said. “Al and Denise will be there, with Claudette. And a few of my girlfriends.” I knew she meant her friends from the leggings scheme.
I was touched that my attendance seemed so important to her, and wondered if I could persuade Dave to drive me. “Can I bring a date?” I asked.
“Oh, of course, sweetie!” she said. “Are you seeing someone?”
“Sort of.” In the month since we’d reconnected, Dave and I had fallen into a pattern of having dinner a few nights a week. We hadn’t tried to have sex again, and with that pressure removed, we’d settled into a friendship tinged, at moments, with romantic overtures that didn’t bother me as much as I’d thought they would. He’d gone to LA one weekend and brought me back a present—a hand-poured candle I was too afraid to light in my firetrap of a room. We sometimes cuddled in his bed after dinner, though we didn’t bother with kissing. I was grateful for Dave’s company, which I’d used like methadone to wean off the heroin of Karina’s friendship. We weren’t really dating. We were two lonely people passing time together, though perhaps that was all a relationship was.
But my family didn’t need to know the details. I’d never introduced them to a romantic partner, or even mentioned the existence of one, and they must have found this lack unsettling. I could use Dave as proof I’d reached the shore of normal adulthood, exempt from speculation. My mom would go to her grave confident in my ability to survive in the world. Al and Denise would amend their judgments of me from when I’d lived with them in Bakersfield. I considered criticisms my mom might have of Dave. He was seventeen years older than me, and divorced, but he was also tall and owned a house. I figured the second set of characteristics more than canceled out the first. She’d be impressed, maybe even envious, that I’d persuaded such a fellow to dateme.
I explained the situation to Dave the next night, while we were having dinner at a ramen place near my cube. He chewed his noodles thoughtfully.
“Doesn’t that seem like a big step?” he said.
“Meeting my mom?” He nodded. “Not at all. I thought it might be fun to take a little road trip.”
“Would we be staying at her house?”
“No, we’ll have to stay in a hotel,” I said. We couldn’t stay at the house, as my mom was using my old room as an office. It was currently occupied by pants and materials used to ship the pants when people bought them, which seemed to happen infrequently. When I’d visited over Christmas, I slept on the couch in the living room, but I doubted the couch would fit two people. “I can pay for the room,” I added.
“It’s not about the money, Linda,” he said, hanging his spoon off the edge of his bowl. “What does she know about me?”
“Nothing yet. I asked if I could bring a date.”
Dave’s face took on an earnest expression. “We’ve been spending a fair amount of time together,” he said.
“We don’t have to put a label on it,” I said.
“Of course. Not a fan of labels myself.”
“Except, for my mom, it might be easier if we say we’re dating.”
“Totally. I mean, I’m great at impressing parents. And I already made you pretend to be my girlfriend, so I owe you one.” He laughed at the memory of our visit to Barley Bros.
He asked how old my mom was turning, and when I told him, he frowned.
“Will she think I’m too old for you?”
“I think she’d be grateful that I had a human partner, regardless of the form they took.”
“Fair enough.” He resumed eating his soup, as if this settled things.
“So you’ll go with me?” I said. “I thought we could drive down next Friday, after work.”
“Drive? Are you kidding? It’s way too far for a weekend trip. We’ll have to fly.”
My cheeks burned. “I can’t do that anymore,” I reminded him.
“Right. The dark path and all. Well, let me think about it.”
Over the next few days, we finalized our plan. I suggested we stay at the Hyatt Regency near John Wayne Airport, and Dave said he’d book us a room. I asked him to request one that faced away from the runways, so I wouldn’t be tempted. I ordered a present for my mom, a pair of socks with her dogs’ faces printed on them.
Dave called the night before our departure, while I was in my cube debating which clothes to bring. “Don’t be mad at me, Linda, but I went ahead and booked us a flight,” he said.
I lowered myself onto my bed, which was strewn with the garments I’d been trying on. I was angry he’d booked a flight after I’d explained to him that I could no longer fly. The main reason I’d invited him was so he could drive me. “I told you, I can’t do that anymore,” I said.
“My back can’t handle two eight-hour drives in a single weekend. Anyway, I thought this would be good for you. I know you’ve developed some kind of phobia around flying, but there’s really no need to be afraid. Statistically, it’s very safe.”
“I’m not afraid to fly,” I said, annoyed that this was how he’d interpreted what I’d told him.
“Then what’s the problem?”
I knew it was pointless to try to explain. No matter what I said, he’d dismiss my thoughts as irrational, using terms borrowed from therapy. “I’m trying to be a good person,” I said.
Dave laughed. “What does that have to do with flying to Irvine? I booked us in first class. Let’s live a little.”
I acquiesced to his plan, seeing no other option. After we hung up, I wondered if Dave was right that flying would be good for me. Perhaps taking a practice flight of my own was the final step in my process of rehabilitation. If I could fly without succumbing to temptation, I would know I had truly changed and was worthy of Karina again. I could not white-knuckle my way through my life’s remaining decades, wearing a sky-obscuring hat and pretending commercial flight did not exist.
Friday, as we pulled into the airport garage, I felt the old tendrils of desire wrap around me, and I did my best to slough them off. I endeavored to see the airport as a normal person would. A place of tedium, of timetables, possessing no more glory than a bus station. I held myself stiffly in the security line. As we walked through the terminal, I kept my gaze trained on the floor, forbidding myself to look out the windows.
We reached our gate, where I caught a glimpse of our plane, a gorgeous 737. My breath caught, a wave of longing crashing upon me. I averted my gaze, conjuring the image of Karina’s horrified face when I’d asked her to be my bridesmaid. The memory of that day helped to dull my desire. I reminded myself I was flying home for my mother’s birthday party. Nothing more.
We were seated in 4E and F. As it was first class, we were the only two on our side of the aisle, which afforded us more privacy than we’d had on previous flights. I sat in the window seat and lowered the shade. My identity as a coach passenger was so ingrained, I felt disturbed by the flight attendant’s solicitousness, proffering blankets and pillows and beverages prior to takeoff. Suddenly, now that I possessed a first-class ticket, I was a person whose ass demanded kissing. We settled in, unwrapping the blankets and draping them over our laps. Dave took two cups of champagne from the flight attendant’s tray, and we tapped the flimsy plastic together in a toast to the weekend.
“To Deborah,” Dave said.
“Deb,” I corrected him.
Soon it was time to take off, the wretched coach passengers having found their seats and stuffed their bloated parcels in the overhead bins. As the plane pulled back from the gate, I felt my nipples harden, my crotch tingling. Sweat gathered under my arms and at the small of my back. The plane’s engines fired. We rushed down the runway, and as his nose lifted, the dam I’d built within myself breached, flooding my body with six weeks of suppressed lust. I shuddered, my vision blurring, my commitment to abstinence diminishing to a speck in the distance, like the houses below us. I felt Dave’s hand worm beneath my thin airline blanket. He unbuttoned my jeans, and I raised my hips to allow his fingers access. I opened my eyes and found his face close to mine. His expression was focused but dispassionate, as though I were a complicated machine he was determined to fix.
As the plane continued to climb, Dave leaned forward as if to look for something on the floor, then plunged his fingers deeper into me, at the same moment the plane banked hard to the right. I gasped with pleasure. Dave guided my left hand under his blanket until it found his erection. Unthinkingly, as if heeding a primordial instinct, I pumped my hand up and down his shaft. As my stroking grew more frenzied, the blanket fell away, exposing him to the cabin air. He shuddered, and I felt his fluid, warm and sticky on my hand. It was an unpleasant sensation, like when coffee from an improperly sealed Starbucks cup dripped onto my hand while I climbed the stairs to the office.
Dave rushed to cover himself. I wiped my hand on my blanket, repulsed. As I regained my bearings, I saw that the woman across the aisle was staring at us, her phone held aloft, the camera’s lens pointed at us. She was around my age, polished-looking, with a high blond ponytail. Our eyes met. She shook her head in disgust and returned to her magazine.
I was filled with shame, both that another person had witnessed our indecent act and that I’d failed to resist the plane’s advances. I kept my face turned away from Dave for the rest of the flight, resenting him for leading me back down the path I’d worked hard to renounce. I wondered if he had planned the whole thing, anticipating a flight would knock me back to my old ways. Why else would he have sprung for first-class seats? Perhaps he’d viewed our dinner dates as the laying of groundwork for a transcendent in-flight hand job.
In the terminal, I told Dave about the woman across the aisle, hoping to off-load some of my shame onto him.
“Oh well,” he said. “She got a free show.”
“I think she might have recorded us.”
“What a pervert,” he said, sounding pleased.
We proceeded toward the exit, past the Subway stall where I’d once toiled. I considered telling Dave about losing my virginity in the walk-in fridge, but I knew he’d find it merely titillating, which would show how little he understood me.
Across from Subway, at Gate B16, a 737 was boarding for Newark. I approached the window, drawn by the uncanny intelligence I perceived in his windscreen. I moved to the left, seeking his tail number, and when I found it I felt the ground shift beneath me. Inscribed on the plane’s flank were the digits I’d sought since I was thirteen: N92823. I’d thought he was condemned to a boneyard in the desert, but here he was, back in service, about to traverse the continent. It had taken seventeen years, but at last, we’d made our way back to each other.
“What’s the matter?” Dave said. I flinched, having forgotten he was standing next to me.
I watched N92823 pull back from the gate. “That’s a plane I flew in once,” I said softly. N92823 turned right on the taxiway, disappearing around a bend. He reappeared a few moments later, on a more distant runway, awaiting his turn in the lineup.
Dave yawned, stretching his arms above his head. He couldn’t have understood the significance of my encounter with N92823, and yet, his indifference filled me with rage. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said.
I ignored him, remaining at the window until N92823’s nose lifted and his form was swallowed by the sky. I was flooded with a sense of cosmic rightness. I saw that even during my period of abstinence, I’d remained woven into the tapestry of fate. I would no longer deny who I was. On our way out of the secure sector, I removed my 49ers hat and threw it in a trash can.
—
As we proceeded through the steps of renting a car and driving to our hotel, I thought of nothing but N92823. My anger at Dave had been displaced by awe at how he’d engineered my reunion with my lost love. I now wondered if the vision board had prompted Dave to book our flight to Irvine, though I’d long ago removed his photo and burned it in the sink. When we reached the check-in desk of the Hyatt Regency, I asked if we could have a room facing the runway, after all. The woman checking us in said there was a room available on the eighth floor, but there was only one bed rather than two.
“That sounds fine,” I said. Dave and I had lain together, sexlessly, several times now, and I didn’t mind him spooning me if it meant I could watch planes take off and land.
We waited for the elevator. “Why’d you ask for a runway view?” Dave said. “We’ll hear planes taking off all night.”
“I hope so,” I said.
Dave grumbled about needing to buy earplugs. We found our room, and I locked myself in the bathroom, where I looked up N92823 and found that he’d been back in service for six months. All that time, I’d flown on inferior planes. I might have been close to my love without knowing it, at an airport or while airborne. I reviewed his flight schedule. Tomorrow morning, he’d depart Newark for Charleston, then return to Newark, then fly to Houston, landing in the late afternoon. For a moment, I seized on the prospect of meeting him in Houston and flying on with him to O’Hare. I found a morning flight from John Wayne to Houston, but the fare was $339, which would leave me with insufficient funds for a ticket on board my love, much less for a ticket back to San Francisco, on the off chance N92823 declined to marry me.
Dave knocked on the door. “Linda? You okay in there?”
I put my plans on hold. We journeyed down the road for dinner at the same Mexican restaurant my family had taken me to as a celebration for what had seemed, for a brief interval, to be my successful initiation as a flight attendant. The interior was festive, with chains of paper garlands strung from the exposed beams of the ceiling. I ordered my usual cheese enchiladas without looking at the menu. Dave gazed at me across the table, and I knew he was thinking that I looked pretty, or something equally degrading. He was enjoying the idea of himself on a sexy sojourn with a younger woman. I resented him for casting me in this role, though I’d invited him to do so by asking him to accompany me, and letting him pay for everything.
Dave dug into the chips and salsa, and through a mouthful of corn he said, “What’s going on with you, Linda?”
“Nothing,” I said, surprised he’d noticed my agitation. I needed to calm myself. I ate a chip.
“Are you still mad I made you fly here? Did you not enjoy first class?”
I had to give him something, or he’d persist in thinking my distraction related to him, as he seemed to believe everything in the world did. “It’s that plane I saw at the airport,” I said. “I recognized his tail number from a flight I took with my family when I was thirteen.”
“Oh?” Dave said with an indulgent smile. “An old nemesis?”
I maintained a neutral expression. “The opposite,” I said. “The best plane I’ve ever known.”
Our entrees arrived. Dave had ordered fajitas, and the sizzling skillet of meat and peppers was unveiled with a degree of fanfare that annoyed me. It had always been Al’s favorite dish, and I’d suspected this was only because he liked the attention. I dug into my enchiladas, hoping my zeal would deflect further questioning, but for once, Dave pressed. What did I mean about the plane? Why was it so great? I wasn’t used to him interrogating my moods, as he was usually too mired in his own grievances to notice me. The hand job seemed to have revived something in him, a strain of assertiveness that could only bring me trouble. I preferred the downtrodden, impotent Dave I’d always known.
I put my fork down. “We were flying to Chicago,” I said. “Midway through, we hit a patch of clear-air turbulence. For two minutes and thirty seconds, we all thought we would die.”
“And that was a good experience?” he said, raising a chunk of chicken with his fork and blowing on it. “It sounds terrible.”
A new plan hatched in my mind. “Would you want to fly to Houston tomorrow, for old times’ sake?”
Dave laughed. “What are you talking about? Tomorrow is your mom’s party.”
I no longer cared about the party, though I did want to give my mother the dog socks.
“Are you nervous about introducing me to your family?” Dave asked.
“It’s not that,” I said. I searched for an excuse that would satisfy him. “I’m nervous about seeing my brother’s wife. She never liked me.”
“Well, screw her,” Dave said. “Don’t worry. I’ll charm her pants off.”
After dinner, we returned to the hotel. I’d been waiting for a chance to be alone with my research on N92823. I drew a bath and lay in it as I investigated. So far, it seemed he’d flown without incident. He’d been a good boy, but perhaps he was waiting for me to turn him bad again. I wondered if he’d been thinking of me all this time, just as I’d thought of him. It was possible that, after years of maintenance and parts-swapping, he was not the plane he’d once been. Perhaps he was N92823 in name only. I hoped not. I hoped the universe had led me to the city of my youth to reunite with my first love. I would have to fly in him to find out.
I wrapped a robe around my body and emerged into the room. Dave lay on the bed, flipping through channels on the muted TV.
“So how did she look?” he said. “Was she scandalized? Turned on?”
“Who?” I said, startled.
“The woman on the plane.”
I’d accidentally played into Dave’s exhibitionist fantasy. “I don’t think she was turned on.” I sat on the edge of the bed, facing the window, and was met by a FedEx cargo plane touching down.
“That was wild. I can’t believe you grabbed me like that. It was so fucking hot.” He inched his hand under the robe, along my inner thigh. I dislodged his hand gently and moved to a chair by the window. Dave seemed unfazed by my rejection. He unmuted the TV.
“So what’s our story for tomorrow?” he asked, over the murmur of other people’s voices. “How did we meet, what’s our status, that kind of thing.”
I was glad Dave had the foresight to iron out these details. “We can say we met at work, and that we’re dating, I guess.”
“Okay, Linda. I’m your boyfriend, then.” He’d landed on a cooking show, a woman beating eggs into flour. I felt queasy as I watched the yolks churn.