Up in the Air Read online

  I lay down with my boots on for a nap. My sleep was not sleep but a paralytic trance. Asif was wrong: I know I get no rest. I dreamed abstractly, of multicolored grids unfurling to the horizon, a giant game board. The game pieces were familiar from Monopoly—the cannon, the shoe, the Scottie dog, the iron—but they floated over the board like space debris. Every few moments, a thin blue laser beam would arc from the board and turn a piece to ash.

  Now I’m awake, in the bathroom, gargling Listerine. The membranes inside my cheeks feel ragged, scorched. I touch my forehead. Its neither chilled nor feverish; it’s the disturbing no-temperature of paper. I need vitamins. I need certain enzymes. The lack of them is visible on my skin. I tan with the slightest sun, but in the mirror now my face can barely muster a reflection.

  The only good news: my credit card is back. They slipped it under the door while I was napping. The identity thief has been cut off, presumably. I’m whole again, with nothing hanging out. My first purchase will be a pair of shoes, and I have a whole hour to buy them—a rarity. According to Pinter’s autobiography, he sleeps in two four-hour shifts from 10 to 2, A.M. and P.M., and takes his meals at three. He writes in the book that all humans lived this way before the dawn of agriculture, but he gives no evidence. That’s typical. In management, it’s the stimulating assertion, not the tested hypothesis, that grabs folks.

  I call Pinter’s house to confirm and get directions. Margaret answers, his so-called co-domestic. Pinter’s contempt for matrimony springs from his belief in male polygamy, which he refrains from practicing himself only because it’s currently illegal, but which he doesn’t rule out for the future. Maybe when he’s a hundred they’ll loosen standards.

  “He’d like to come pick you up,” says Mrs. Pinter. “He bought a new car he’s eager to show off.”

  “That’s fine. I can’t wait to see your lovely home.”

  “It’s under renovation, I’m afraid. We’re down to two inhabitable rooms.”

  “Maybe you’d like to eat out tonight.”

  “Of course not. Sandy needs his food prepared just so. He doesn’t trust these restaurants. They overheat things and screw up the protein chains.”

  “When should I expect him?”

  “Five, ten minutes.”

  “I thought he ate at three?”

  “This year it’s two. Sandy corrected for daylight saving time.”

  The genius act is beginning to annoy me, and I have a high tolerance for quirkiness, even when it’s a calculated put-on. One of the speakers I saw at last year’s GoalQuest, a world-renowned alpinist who died on Everest (just for seven minutes; they revived him, but only after he’d received a vision of abiding interest to the business world), wore shearling slippers with an Italian suit and insisted on chewing gum while speaking. His painful, frostbitten feet explained the slippers, but the bubbles he blew were the purest affectation, intended to show that he plays by his own Hoyles. He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can’t make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.

  I put away clothes to prepare for Pinter’s visit. How do hotel rooms fall apart so quickly, and even when I’ve hardly packed a thing? Their surfaces seem to cry out for abuse the way new haircuts cry out for a mussing. Perhaps it’s the urge to make the space your own by displacing the aura of the previous occupant. When someone vacates a plane seat or a room, they leave behind a molecular disturbance. This room, I’d guess, was last inhabited by a bickering family on vacation.

  Pinter knocks just once. Efficiency. I greet him wearing khakis and a blue shirt and holding a legal pad with writing on it, trying to look like a man who’s always occupied.

  “We finally meet. A privilege. Excuse the room,” I say.

  “I need your toilet.”

  “Of course. It’s right in there.”

  Pinter doesn’t close the door completely, exposing me to sounds I’d rather not hear from one of his reputation, whose courses I’ve audited. The toilet-roll holder rattles as it unspools. Despite his famous abhorrence of waste and excess, Pinter has a lavish way with tissue. I wait for a flush, a running faucet. Nothing. When he reappears I shake his hand, whose absolute dryness confirms that it’s unwashed. I understand from studying his books that there isn’t a custom, tradition, or rule of hygiene that Pinter hasn’t dismissed or tinkered with.

  He sits on the end of my bed, not facing me. He’s a small man, balding, but hairy in his crevices. His ears and nostrils are densely webbed, and there’s fur in the cleft of his jutting, pitted chin. His mouth is a long, lipless crescent, like a drawing.

  “I don’t see an ashtray. Is this room non-smoking?”

  “Don’t worry. The alarms aren’t sensitive.”

  “There’s an alarm? It’s not worth it then.”

  “I’ll join you.”

  Pinter produces a Baggie of loose tobacco and rolls two lumpy cigarettes. “Why do they have to ruin everything? The California dream was freedom once. Now we’re ruled by nags and health fanatics. You’re familiar with my definition of health?”

  “I am.”

  “Mediocrity raised to an ideal. Health is why we get sick. Health-consciousness.”

  But he won’t eat in restaurants because they warp the proteins.

  Pinter is not a social smoker. He puffs like an Indian, reverent, eyes shut. His free hand opens and closes on his knee like a gasping fish. He flicks his ash on his corduroys and rubs it in with a newborn’s soft pink thumb.

  “I’m celebrating this afternoon,” he says. “I signed a substantial contract yesterday.”

  Discouraging news—I’d thought he was retired. I’d counted on his poor financial condition to help sell my proposal.

  “It’s supposed to be confidential, but secrets bore me. An airline out of Phoenix hired me.”

  “Not Desert Air?”

  “You’ve heard of them?”

  I nod. “They compete with the airline I fly.”

  Pinter coughs. A volume of smoke rolls out and keeps on coming, as if his whole body is filled with it. “Good company?”

  “You tell me.”

  “They have a problem,” he says. “They built their business on price and price alone, which is effective but risky. I’ve written on this. A woman of easy virtue will soon grow popular, but she’ll fail when it comes to attracting a loyal mate. Long term, it’s better to be good than cheap. Wanton discounting is a downward spiral, so I’ve urged them to reinterpret their identity. Hauling warm bodies from point A to point B inspires no one. It’s a form of trucking. Promoting human togetherness, however, ignites the vital flame in all involved, the worker as well as the customer. Agreed?”

  “A marketing angle.”

  “Much deeper. A first principle. It starts with seating. Like should sit with like. Parents of small children with other parents. Young singles with young singles. No more jumbling. We learn who the passengers are through detailed surveys and task a computer with mixing them appropriately, the way a good hostess would seat a dinner party.”

  “Manipulation like that can breed resentment.”

  “People won’t know we’re doing it,” says Pinter. “All they’ll know is that they feel more comfortable. Friendlier, closer. We’ve run some live experiments.”

  My toes curl in my boots. I feel invaded, as if I’ve just opened the curtains in my living room and discovered a neighbor with binoculars. Thank heaven I haven’t flown Desert Air this month, though if they’re doing this, Morse’s Great West will follow. I have to admit that, lately, I’ve felt watched.

  “You’d be amazed how well it worked,” says Pinter. “We ran a satisfaction survey afterwards and couldn’t have been more pleased with the responses.”

  “What else are you suggesting that they do?”

  “Closed-circuit televisions in the gates connected to video cameras in the cabins. To shorten those anxious minutes when people deplane. You’re waiting for someone,
perhaps you’re holding flowers, but it seems to take ages before you see his face. You worry he missed his flight. You don’t know what to think. This way you see him the moment he’s in range.”

  He looks to me for a reaction, and I blink. His ideas are pure foolishness, born of arrogance. The man hardly flies, yet he’s dashing off prescriptions for a growing regional carrier. This is hubris. This is too much fame. I’m of a mind to pocket my proposal and tailor it for one of Pinter’s critics—for Arthur Cargill, maybe, of the Keane Group, the father of Duplicative Skills Reporting.

  “Help me,” says Pinter. “You’re skeptical. Speak up.”

  “With all due respect, sir—”

  “Don’t kowtow. It’s beneath you. I made a few inquiries after your call and discovered you’re very well thought of. An up-and-comer. I agreed to share a meal with you because I expected a peer-to-peer exchange.”

  I don’t dare ask him who spoke so highly of me. Someone at MythTech? I’ve heard he’s close to them. There’s a story that he attended the Child’s wedding, an exclusive affair in Sun Valley, Idaho, and presented the newlyweds with a silver cheese knife given to him by a Saudi prince in appreciation for his work untangling supply lines in the Gulf War.

  “I come to this as a consumer,” I say. “A passenger. I appreciate your spirit, but frankly I feel like you’re toying with people’s lives here. An aircraft is not a glass beaker.”

  “The world’s a beaker. This is axiomatic in our field.”

  “Churches? Are churches beakers?”

  Pinter glares. I’ve violated the code of our profession by invoking the sacred. I’m out of bounds.

  “You’re religious?” he says.

  “Not conventionally.”

  “Of course not. No one’s conventionally anything anymore. But do you believe in the image of God in man?”

  “I see where you’re going with this. I slipped. I’m sorry. I’ve been surrounded by Mormons for a decade.”

  “It’s leaching in. You insulted me,” he says. “You implied I’m corrupt. A Faustian. Untrue. Helping this little airline find an edge in an increasingly cutthroat industry offends not a single commandment, that I’m aware of. In truth, it’s a moral act par excellence.”

  “I repeat my apology.”

  Pinter sighs, gets up. The difference in his stature sitting and standing is remarkably slight. He’s all torso and no legs, though his long baggy jacket conceals the fact. We face each other. He addresses my chest, as if we’re the same height, and in my weakness I play along—I crouch.

  “Margaret and I have been cooking. A request: none of your God talk at supper. And no business.”

  “You do understand why I’ve come, I hope. My concept?”

  “Afterwards. At the table we stay ‘on topic.’ ”

  “And what’s the topic?”

  “That’s up to you. The guest.”

  “I’ve taken your classes. I want to thank you for them. You were on satellite. You couldn’t see me.”

  “That’s an assumption you have no basis for.”

  “I know how satellites work.”

  “The old ones, maybe.”

  Because the street-side entrance to his house is blocked by landscapers and mounds of earth and because the front porch has been removed, leaving the doorway suspended in a wall, Pinter parks his new German sports coupe in an alley. It’s been a long ride. Ontario has traffic, uniformly frantic in all directions, like a stepped-on anthill, and Pinter has no business being out in it. His driving style combines inattention to others with a deep absorption in his own car. Even while cruising, he fussed with the controls, tilting the wheel and pumping up the lumbar and adjusting the louvered vents of the AC. He’ll die in that car, and I suspect he knows it, which is why he’s so eager to enjoy its gimmicks.

  Margaret stands on a step by the back door holding an old-style cocktail with a cherry in it. She looks like a girl in her twenties who’s been aged by an amateur movie makeup artist using spirit gum for wrinkles and sprinkled baby powder to gray her hair. She greets me too kindly, kissing both my cheeks, yet barely acknowledges her co-domestic, who knifes past her into the kitchen and pours two drinks. The kitchen is one of the two inhabitable rooms, the other being a bedroom whose door is open, through which I can see a massive four-poster bed dressed with paisley sheets and furry blankets like the type you once saw on water beds. Access to the remainder of the house is blocked by thumbtacked sheets of dusty plastic. Behind them, a shadowy carpenter fires off bursts from a pneumatic nail gun. The noise is piercing.

  “Sandy tells me you live in Colorado, out on the frontier.”

  “I used to live there. I had an apartment, that is. I gave it up.”

  “Where do you live now?”

  “Just here and there.”

  “Literally?”

  “People do it. And not a few.”

  “So this is a trend?”

  “Not yet. You’ll see it soon, though.”

  A drink is placed in my hand. It’s sweet and strong and tastes of 1940s Hollywood. Pinter lights another cigarette and resumes his peculiar smoking trance while peppery Margaret continues with the questions, timing her words to avoid the nail gun’s volleys. Over the royal bed I glimpse a picture: some mythical scene of a semi-naked virgin being chased through a dappled glade by randy goat-men.

  The table is set, but I detect no cooking odors. Pinter wraps an apron around his waist and opens a curvy vintage refrigerator packed solid with convenience food. His cigarette smoke mingles with the frost cloud, a sight I find profoundly unappetizing.

  “We’re dining alfresco this afternoon,” says Margaret. “The construction draws so much current our stove is useless. Did Sandy describe our project to you?”

  “No. It looks like it’s fairly extensive.”

  She motions me forward, then peels back the curtain of plastic. I peek through. The living room walls have been stripped back to the studs and a circular hole the size of a small swimming pool has been cut in the hardwood floor.

  “Our arena,” says Margaret. “Sandy thought it up. See where the ceiling’s gone? That’s where the lights go. We’ll surround it with comfortable seating, pillows, throws. A stage for our debates, out little theatricals. We proportioned it after the Colosseum, actually.”

  “Your guacamole’s skinned over,” Pinter says.

  “Squeeze lemon juice on it.”

  “I can’t find the chips.”

  “You ate them in the night. Just use saltines.”

  Margaret refastens the plastic in the doorway. I have questions, but don’t know where to start; the syrupy cocktail has turned my brain to sludge. The puzzle of the arena aside, what happened to Pinter’s dietary discipline? The spread he’s begun to assemble on the table—plastic tubs of pre-made onion dip, lunchmeat slices rolled and pinned with toothpicks, a dish of canned fried onions, a jar of olives—reminds me of sample day at a small-town supermarket or the grand opening of a Chevy dealer. I wonder if its wealth of additives holds the secret to Margaret’s pickled youthfulness.

  Pinter refreshes our drinks and we sit down. The china and silver are real, the napkins linen. Pinter, since coming home, has gained in stature, and as we toast—“To the life force,” Margaret says—I see that both the table and the counters stand at wheelchair height. I tower beside them. I feel fatherly, monumental. Normal-sized Margaret’s the mother and Pinter’s our son.

  “So,” she says, “did you select a topic?” She’s poised to start eating, but there are rules, apparently.

  “An actual formal topic.”

  They nod.

  “I’m blank. Politics?”

  “Anything,” Pinter snorts. He’s hungry. “Our last guest—”

  “Don’t lead him,” says Margaret. “Let him associate.”

  My gaze drifts to the bedroom painting. “Pursuit.”

  They smile and dip their crackers. I’m a hit. I take a rolled slice of bologna as my prize.


  “I think it’s important to start experientially. Now which of us at this table,” Pinter asks, “has actually been pursued?”

  “I have,” Margaret says.

  “Ryan?”

  “Romantically? Professionally?”

  “You chose the topic. What was on your mind?”

  “Omaha.”

  “Them,” he says. “No business talk.”

  “You know them, though?”

  “We’ve mingled. No business talk.”

  Margaret dabs guacamole off her lips. “Sandy, you’ve heard this, so try not to jump in. It happened in London, England, in the sixties. Sandy was there as a guest of British Railways.”

  “Rationalizing their timetables,” he says.

  “I’d read about Carnaby Street in all the magazines and wanted to buy an outfit. I took a bus. I rode on the top deck, to see the sights. There were a couple of boys with Beatles haircuts—Sandy had one himself once—”

  “Oh go to hell.”

  “You did.”

  I reach for a black olive. My drink is empty. Why is Pinter staring at my crotch?

  “Anyway, two moptops. Drinking beer. Out of those extra large cans the English favor. And I, in what I’d guess you’d call my innocence—”

  Pinter’s eyebrows arch. His nostrils flare.

  “—approach these two lads to ask about their fashions. You know, their ‘scene.’ Can they point me to a shop, say—some place that’s out of the way and not for tourists? They tell me of course, if I’ll buy them a beer. A deal. So off we go into the streets, those crooked streets, and before I know it, well, they’re groping me. Against a wall. Beside a garbage can. And they take all my money.”

  “The money that you paid them.”