Up in the Air Read online

  Julie is misinformed, as usual. She’s referring to the beta-blockers prescribed for a funny heartbeat that turned up during an annual corporate physical a few months after our father’s funeral. I was tired at the time, surviving on diet cola while shuttling between Denver, LA, and Houston as part of an effort to smooth the troubled merger of two mid-size regional advertising agencies. Worn down by my grief and the gloom of the assignment, which consisted of identifying redundancies and recommending layoffs, I suffered a kind of segmented collapse marked by bouts of irresistible sleepiness during several key meetings and lunch appointments. Because of the politeness of my associates, who declined to mention my little naps after I came to, and because no single individual witnessed more than one of the attacks, weeks passed before I caught on to what was happening. I imagined I’d dozed off for a few seconds, when in fact I’d been falling asleep for a few minutes. I finally learned what was wrong at LAX, where I nodded off at a pay phone in the Compass Club and missed a flight. I was granted a paid leave. I grounded myself for seven weeks (a record), took a few classes to refresh my spirits, and made an adequate recovery. Other than the minor arrhythmia, there was just one lingering complication. It happened that during one of my brief blackouts—at a downtown Denver oyster bar—sneaky Craig Gregory had played a trick on me, slipping my wallet out of my back pocket and inserting a scribbled-on business card for one Melissa Hall at Great West Airlines. “Fantastic meeting you. Call!” the message read. There was also a row of X’s and a heart. I found the card while reorganizing my Rolodex, puzzled over it for a day or two, then thought what the hell and gave a ring. Assuming the woman was a flight attendant, I left a sweet, if tentative, voice mail, and received a call back from a mannerly Melissa—Soren Morse’s executive assistant and, I found out later, his sometime mistress. Here’s what was strange, though: after much embarrassment, and after we’d identified the trickster—Craig Gregory knew Melissa through a cousin—she told me that she’d seen my name while making up invitations to a Christmas party Morse was throwing for Great West’s heaviest flyers. We agreed to say hi to each other at the party, which was just a month away, but my invitation never arrived. I called to inquire, but Melissa wouldn’t speak to me, and I could only conclude that Morse himself had struck me from the guest list. Jealousy? I tried my theory on Craig Gregory, who laughed it off but no doubt wrote it down for the “This is your life” file he keeps on everyone.

  All in all, a murky time for me. But I repeat: there were never any seizures. My sisters spend too much time on the phone together erroneously filling in the blanks of their brother’s life.

  This matter of having sisters. I’ve done my best. When Kara was born after years and years of trying—in Minnesota you weren’t supposed to have to try; babies were supposed to come like crops—my parents already considered themselves old. My arrival surprised them. My father was as pleased as any man to have a son, but he was busy by then, with a growing gas route to attend to. In helping him I saw my opening. By five I was riding shotgun in the propane truck, learning a business that, if it had survived, I’d still be in today, with no regrets. The secret was providing added value with every refilled tank—carrying the news from farm to farm, adjusting and reigniting pilot lights, delivering packages for snowbound widows. My apprenticeship secured a spot for me in my father’s everyday routine and in the larger life of the community.

  Everything changed when Julie came along, a month premature but radiant and perfect, with none of that simian newborn homeliness. If I’d been a surprise, she was a shock. Her beauty felt like a judgment on our averageness, and we fell into competition for her favor. My father, who’d grown comfortable by then, cut back on his hours to spend more time at home, while Kara and my mother scrimmaged constantly over who would change the baby’s diapers and push her in the new stroller through the aisles of the downtown J. C. Penney. I was odd man out again. Whenever I managed to get alone with Julie, I spoiled her with treats and toys and labored to impress her with my manliness. When I was fourteen and she was ten, I knocked down an older boy in front of her. I took her homework when she got home from school and returned it to her in the morning, finished. I was her first crush when she turned twelve, and when I went off to college I sent her letters playing up my successes and achievements and dismissing the girls who supposedly had eyes for me. Our romance crested during a summer vacation when I smuggled her into an R-rated movie and she rested her head on my shoulder during a love scene. A neighbor sitting a couple of rows behind us had a word with my mother. We were finished.

  “The wedding present wasn’t from me,” I say. “Kara must have sent something in my name. What was it anyway?”

  “A lawn mower. It follows these wires you bury in the ground and runs by remote control.”

  My mouth goes dry. I can’t swallow my cookie.

  “Where was it sent from?”

  “Salt Lake City. Here. A store called Vann’s Electronics. You signed the card. You’re saying you don’t remember buying it?”

  “I’m not saying anything. I’m going to bed.”

  I lie in the dark guest room beside a window that frames the spire of the Mormon Temple, as white as aspirin and topped with a gold angel. I’ve set my sleep machine on blowing leaves and swallowed a sedative. My left hand is tucked under the waistband of my boxers and in my other hand I hold my phone.

  “Talk to her. Build her up inside,” says Kara. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it? Be tough, though. Don’t tell her she’ll be okay no matter what or that she’s some infinite bundle of creativity. Don’t bullshit her, Ryan. But try to make her feel good. This is a crisis of confidence we’re dealing with.”

  The side of my face with the phone against it aches. I switch to the other ear. “I’m on a business trip.”

  “Fine. So leave her to run away again. Maybe we’ll hear from her at Christmas. Shit.”

  The air on my chest is heavy, hard to lift. I roll up on my side for easier breathing. “You’re saying to keep her with me?”

  “In plain sight.”

  “A question. When Wendy saw me in Salt Lake last week . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “She’s sure it was me?”

  My sister sighs. “Out with it. Tell me. You lied to me before.”

  “I think she was right. I was here. It slipped my mind, though. The cities don’t stick in my head the way they used to.”

  “What?”

  “There are credit card records. I made a purchase. Kara, I’m not at my best right now.”

  A hush. Southerners have an oral tradition, they say. Minnesotans have a silence tradition. Not speaking is our preferred way of communicating.

  “You haven’t been eating either,” she says. “Have you?”

  “Poorly.”

  “Come home. Right now. Come home right now. I know what you’re doing. I know what’s going on here. This is all about earning free tickets. You need your family.”

  “My job ends Monday. I’m leaving before they fire me. I have appointments, interviews.”

  “Come home.”

  “It’s not my home anymore.”

  “It’s where your mother is.”

  “That’s why it’s not,” I say.

  With the earpiece against my cheek I let her rant. One of my nephews opens his bedroom door and I hear him pad down the hallway to the bathroom and tinkle into the bowl. We start so small, and the space we take up as we grow is gone forever. Not everything is recycled. That space is gone.

  “I need to sleep,” I tell her when she’s calmer. “I’ll try to talk sense to Julie. I’ll bring her with me. I have a meeting tomorrow, but she can come. I don’t want her vanishing in that van again.”

  “ ‘Take’ her with me,” she says.

  “I think it’s ‘bring.’ ”

  “I’m coming back there. I’ll get her home myself.”

  “I said I’ll do it. I’ll bring her down to Phoenix. In the morning I’ll put her o
n a plane back home.”

  “Why do I have to do everything myself? Why am I always the glue?”

  “I’m doing it.”

  “You’re telling me you’re the glue? You’re not the glue! There’s a wedding on Saturday.”

  “And you’re the glue.”

  “Die, Ryan. Just get it over with. Goodbye.”

  I stopped in Salt Lake last week. I wake, remembering. I remember that there was nothing to remember, except for telling a man who’d lost his job that careers nowadays aren’t ladders, they’re lattices, and then I explained to him what a lattice was and gave him a model résumé to study. I killed time in a store for an hour after the meeting and bought Keith and Julie their gift, which I had shipped. Then I flew off to Boise, I believe, where I gave the same speech to another man. The lattice speech.

  There, I remember now. I wasn’t robbed. It turns out that we’ve been together this whole time, all of the Ryans. We just got separated.

  This has happened before. I’ve never told a soul. I’ve met myself coming and going. It’s a secret. It’s only because you’ve been such a patient listener, there in your seat with your drink, your nuts, your napkin, prepared to crash with me, if it comes to that—because isn’t that, finally, the contract between us flyers?—that I’m breaking down and telling you.

  nine

  at seven o’clock on Wednesday morning Asif drives us to the airport in his Mercedes, a long black beauty that ought to have a flag flying from its antenna. The radio plays a conservative talk show whose amped-up host rattles papers into the mike and has mastered the art of speaking without swallowing. Our democracy died in 1960, he says, but he doesn’t provide specifics, unlike my father, whose doomsaying always included clear-cut timelines and definite turning points. The sun crawling up behind the Mormon Temple casts a peculiarly weak and filtered light, and a breeze stirs the surface of the Great Salt Lake, which appears to be filled with old bathwater this morning. Even the seagulls wind-skating its edges seem reluctant to land and wet their bellies.

  “When should I pick you up tonight?” says Asif. I can tell he holds my plan in low regard. Not only is he convinced that Julie needs rest, but this notion of visiting a far-off city without spending the night there baffles him.

  “We’ll get in late,” I say. “We’ll grab a cab.”

  “How do I explain all this if Kara calls?”

  “Her sister and brother needed some family time.”

  At the ticket counter I pay full fare for both of us and make my pitch for a pair of first-class upgrades. Julie stands back as I wrangle with the agent, embarrassed by my assertiveness, no doubt. Minnesotans are taught to accept first offers gratefully, but in Airworld you’re nowhere if you don’t negotiate. Unfortunately, the agent is hanging tough. He grants me a seat because I have a coupon, but insists that I turn over ten thousand miles for Julie’s seat—ten thousand miles each way. I roll my eyes.

  “Pull up my customer profile. This is crazy.”

  Julie cringes and turns her head away. The agent runs his fingers over his keyboard, his mind a symphony of codes and acronyms. Though I’ve never seen him before, I know his story. He’s a lifetime employee who lives for strikes and sick-outs and spends his evenings figuring his pension on his home computer. He’s an officer in the union, undismissable, who sleeps through his annual performance reviews and savors the frustration of his customers, cheerfully forwarding their written complaints to his impotent superiors. He lives for some strange, consuming, pointless hobby—playing King Arthur in medieval fairs or collecting vintage outboard motors—and has come to believe that if not for certain health problems brought on by his stressful work environment, he might have been a man of influence.

  “I have your data in front of me,” he says.

  “Come on, let’s just go,” Julie whispers.

  I wave her off. “How many miles do you see there?”

  He lowers his glasses, which are attached to a cord, like an old woman’s. “Nine hundred ninety-five thousand two hundred and one.”

  “Drop it,” Julie pleads. The agents smiles at her. He’s enjoying playing us off against each other.

  “And what does that tell you about me? Huh?” I say.

  “There’s a note in our system,” the agent says. He points a stubby finger at the screen. “Did you lose a bag last week, sir?”

  “No.”

  He types some more. “I’m showing we found a bag at SLC and sent it on to a Denver residence per the luggage tag: 1214 Gates Street, Apartment 16B. There was no one home to claim it. Is that your address?”

  “It was. I moved out.” This isn’t making sense. Although it turns out that I did come to Salt Lake last week, I never check bags, so I couldn’t have lost it here.

  “What’s your new address?” the agent says.

  “There isn’t one. Listen, I didn’t lose a bag. I’d know.” I look behind me for Julie, but she’s gone. “Are you going to upgrade my companion’s ticket, or do we have to call your supervisor?”

  The agent must feel that he’s toyed with me sufficiently; he prints out two boarding passes and hands them over as though all I’d needed to do was ask politely. My platinum customer status leaves him no choice. I ask him if he saw where Julie went and he nods at a newsstand across the terminal, then slips me a card with Great West’s lost luggage number.

  Julie is browsing the home decor section of the newsstand’s magazine rack, mooning over photos of claw-foot tubs and built-in stainless steel refrigerators with ice and water dispensers in their doors. Such publications fascinate me, too, though not because I’m about to enter a marriage whose primary solace will be a line of credit at Ethan Allen, courtesy of Keith’s parents, who run an outlet. They intrigue me, these pictures, because the rooms they showcase strike me as buffed-up funeral parlors, basically, designed to display and preserve the upright dead. The flowers, the waxy furniture. It chills me. Lori, my ex, used to drag me to garage sales, convinced that she had a talent for discerning beauty and value beneath the dust and crud. What sorry wastelands. Console TV sets sheathed in chipped veneer. Dressers with sticky drawers and missing handles. The stuff had all been new once, clean and promising, and all I could see in it was depreciation. The depreciation of the owners, too.

  I apologize for the confusion at the ticket counter, but Julie goes on reading and won’t acknowledge me. Our morning isn’t progressing as I’d hoped. My plan was to spend an hour at the airport broadening her horizons and introducing her to America’s pumping commerical heart. She’s been in Polk Center too long, it shrinks a person, but this is a place of options, of possibilities.

  “Let’s go to the club. I have to make some calls.”

  “The club?”

  “I’ll show you. The magazines are free there.”

  “Ryan, I need to go home.”

  “Tomorrow. Thursday.”

  “I’m letting a lot of people down,” says Julie.

  “Don’t worry. They’ll still be there when you get back.”

  “That’s not always true.”

  “It’s true in Minnesota.”

  The club attendant waves us in with all the graciousness of a royal doorman. I check Julie’s face; she’s flattered, I can see it. The buffet impresses her too—she pauses, stares. Midwesterners are beguiled by free food, even anorexics, apparently; it speaks to our unconscious, collective longing for a bounteous harvest. I pour myself a glass of orange juice from one of the glass carafes propped up in ice buckets (why do they always offer tomato and prune juice? Does anyone actually drink them anymore?) and watch as Julie reviews the pastry tray and uses a pair of scalloped metal tongs to select a caloric lemon Danish dusted with powdered sugar. And she’s not finished. She empties a single-serving box of bran flakes into a paper bowl, tops it with raisins and a glob of yogurt, then breaks off a greenish banana from a bunch of them, peels it, and slices it with a plastic knife.

  “Get a table by the big TV there. You can watc
h your portfolio. CMB.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A little global bank you own a piece of. It’s up two points. You’re richer every minute.”

  I duck into one of the carrels in the business center and dial my assistant in Denver. He’s there, for once. He has a memo on Texas he needs to fax me, but Texas is over, it’s obsolete. I punted. He gives me the address of Dwight’s hotel in Phoenix and passes on several other routine messages, including another from Linda at DIA. He confirms my Las Vegas hotel reservation, which I ask him to cancel because the Cinema Grand has labor issues, I read in last week’s Journal, and part of the new me is not being a scab. I ask for a suite at the Mount Apollo instead, the place with the five-story revolving Pegasus that spreads its great fiberglass wings on the half hour.

  “One more little thing,” I say. “Contact Great West baggage at DIA and ask if they have a piece of luggage for me. If they do, have it sent to the office and open it.”

  “You lost a bag?”

  “That’s what they’re telling me.”

  “I don’t know if I should mention this,” says Kyle, “but I saw a sort of strange memo on your desk. Craig Gregory’s assistant delivered it by mistake; he grabbed it back ten minutes after he brought it. The subject line read ‘Faithful Orange.’ ”

  “Interesting.”

  “Your initials were in the text. ‘RB in place,’ it said.”

  “That’s all?”

  “There was more, but I didn’t have time to read it. They snatched it out of my hand, like it was secret.”

  “Sniff around and tell me what you find.”

  “What’s Faithful Orange?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The air in the club smells of lint and vacuum bags and behind me I hear the cable financial guru predicting a major downturn in corporate bonds. He steered me right on Chase Manhattan, after all. I sit for a while in the tilting, castered chair and watch a light rain gust in out of the west, speckling the runways as it advances and sending the ground workers scrambling for orange slickers. It takes so many people to keep me airborne—night-shift janitors riding rotary waxers, crawl-space plumbers wielding clamps and wrenches, meteorologists, navigators, cooks—and this morning I feel like I’m failing them somehow. My skeleton feels like a ladder of lead pipes.