Airplane Rides Read online

  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.”

  Chapter Two

  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 statemen
t 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.