Up in the Air Read online

  “I’d recommend General Electric, but I can’t. Their media holdings offend me morally. A long-term investment should elevate its owner. That puts me in the minority, but so be it. This isn’t well known, but I count among my clients the American Lutheran Church. That calls for standards.”

  I’m inspired. I truly am. The man’s a giant. And to think that, just now, I have him to myself.

  “I’ll tell you what I told the Lutheran bishops: load up on Chase Manhattan under sixty. Chase is your baby. A house upon a rock.”

  The flight’s only stop is Elko, and knowing Elko, no one will get on or off when we set down. A curious city—Basque restaurants on every corner, a few small casinos, miles of trailer parks, and a Main Street boutique that sells candy panties to prostitutes. I once spent an evening there with a billionaire, 104th on the Forbes 400 list, whose family toy firm I’d been called in to downsize. The man was shopping for a hobby ranch and was eager to visit a brothel, but not alone. He had me hold his wallet in case of trouble and I found myself poking through it while he partied. I felt that a billionaire’s wallet might teach me something. Inside I found an expired driver’s license whose photo convinced me the man had had a face-lift. Also, a credit card. White. Not platinum, white. When I think of Elko I think of that pale card, of what it could buy. Whole states. The desert itself. After the billionaire finished with his girl, we returned to his jet, which had twin sleeping cabins. I heard him masturbating through the bulkhead, seducing himself in a made-up female voice that sounded like one of those singing-chipmunk records.

  What you don’t want, I remember thinking that night, is to feature in such a man’s dreams. I’m scared of billionaires, though not for the same reasons my father was. If their goal was just world domination, we’d all be safer; the problems arise when they tamper with individuals.

  I turn on my tape again, then click it off. Too many words in one day and I go fuzzy. The flight attendant leans close. I’m sure I know her.

  “Sir?”

  “You’re Denise. Chicago–Los Angeles.”

  “Just reassigned last week.” She quiets her voice. “We’re having difficulties with a passenger. The man in the golf shirt”—she points—“beside the lady there?”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s intoxicated. He’s bothering her. I know you’re enjoying having your own row here . . .”

  “Not at all. Bring her up. I’ll move my things.”

  “She’s flying through to Reno.”

  “Send her up.”

  I form first impressions more quickly than other people. The woman’s sense of space is complicated; her every movement seems to be a choice between precisely two alternatives, one wholly right, the other completely wrong. She pauses, and in her pause she weighs decisions, rising halfway from her seat, then all the way, rotating her shoulders and then her neck, each action acute and separate, like an insect’s. It’s not unattractive, the way she stops and starts, but it speaks of a certain painful doubleness, as though she once suffered a paralyzing accident and had to retrain her muscles through therapy. I was in such an accident myself once, though the damage it caused is not for me to judge.

  Instead of letting her past me to the window seat, I scoot over one space, my briefcase on my lap. After being trapped beside the drunk, the woman will want an open exit path.

  “That jerk,” she says.

  “They’re everywhere these days.”

  “I’m afraid I attract them. I must send out some signal.”

  “It’s the luck of the draw. We’re seated by computer.”

  So here we are. It’s all decided now: in what tone of voice we’ll converse, how close we’ll sit, how far we’ll delve into each other’s stories. Such negotiations happen quickly—they’re over before you’re aware they’ve even begun, and everything that follows between two strangers just extends this instant contract. We’ve already faced a common foe, the drunk, and established our superior humanity, but that will be the sum of it, I’ll wager. Our vectors are fixed: ever onward, parallel, but fated not to touch or cross. Romance needs conflict, a collision course, but we’ve been doomed to agreement, to empathy.

  She’s not the one. The list grows ever shorter. We’ll joke and kid, we’ll discover odd affinities, but it’s over between us, and I’m relieved.

  “They shouldn’t have served him. He boarded stinking,” she says. “I thought the FAA had rules on that.”

  “They’re only enforced in economy and coach. Welcome to the jungle.”

  “I’m Alex.”

  “Ryan.”

  Alex, I’d guess, is an artist of some kind, though not the highbrow type that I dislike. She works on contract. She’s learned to sell herself. Her ugly glasses are the giveaway; their dark, chunky frames, which are just this side of dowdy, have an ironic, thrift-shop quality meant to convey independence and eclecticism. Before CTC, when I still did marketing, I worked with graphic designers from time to time; accessories meant everything to them. They’d wear a burlap sack for pants if they could find a cute belt to hold it up.

  “Going to Reno for work or for the action?”

  She frowns. “The action?”

  “The gambling,” I say. I can see that Alex doesn’t bet, but I sense she regards herself as a free spirit. She’ll be flattered that I could mistake her for a player.

  “No, but I’d love to learn. I like the craps tables. All the backchat, all the jabbering. I’m here on work—I coordinate events.”

  “Weddings?”

  “Also conventions and benefits. Instant ersatz ambience my specialty.”

  I contemplate two responses to this comment, which, thanks to Verbal Edge, I understand. One: I’ll warn her against maligning her work. It seems adult and witty, yes, but go too far and the joke will be on you. Two: I’ll laugh. I’ll let her mock herself until she becomes depressed in earnest, and then I’ll weigh in with a pep talk and sage advice based on my work with redundant executives who minimized the value of their jobs until the day they lost them and broke down bawling or drove to the river and swallowed a hundred Advils. I’d guess her age as twenty-eight or so, the point when working women first taste success and realize they’ve been conned. A crucial moment—it’s when the ache sets in. Sometimes it leads to marriage and a family. Sometimes it spurs devotion to a cause. Men reach this point, too, of course, but it seldom results in major changes. That’s how it happened for me in my late twenties, when it dawned on me that CTC was not just a temporary assignment. I weighed my alternatives, convinced myself I had none, and here I am—subsisting on smoked almonds, chasing miles.

  I laugh with her. Run yourself down, go on ahead.

  “I’m doing a benefit for an interim senator. The wife of the guy who died water-skiing.”

  “Nielsen.”

  “Widowhood with a purpose, that’s my theme. Grays and golds for a color scheme. The food? Rare prime rib, I’m thinking. All that blood. Sacrifice and renewal. Martyrdom.”

  “Complicated work.”

  “It’s textbook, actually.”

  This statement offends me; it’s subtly disrespectful. Alex doesn’t yet know my occupation, but I doubt that she takes me for a neurosurgeon or someone whose work is more challenging than hers. So if she’s just a hack, an uninspired grunt, then what does that make me—this man with a standard-issue side-part, wearing a lightweight navy travel suit and synthetic-blend odor-resistant stay-up socks.

  “What’s textbook about it?”

  “It’s just so middle-class.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I ask her.

  She touches her glasses, pushing them higher on her bony nose. Her face is handsome, angular, distinguished, the product of generations of prudent mating by people who worked hard and skimped on frills only to give rise to a bohemian.

  Her attitude reminds me of my college years. My father should never have sent me to DeWitt. It was the name that impressed him, the slick brochure, the aura of humanistic b
road-mindedness. In fact, the place was a haven for bratty pricks—reggae-grooving, seaboard hippie kids in school to refine their contempt for people like me, who’d been raised in the wheaty void between the coasts by mothers who draped plastic on their sofas, which they called davenports. My roommate, a boy from the Washington, D.C., suburbs, smoked dope from a Native American hand-carved pipe, cashed monthly checks from his trust fund that made me gulp, and listened to “world music” on a high-end stereo worth more than one of my father’s propane tankers. He called himself a feminist, of all things, and enlisted me in “a self-criticism circle.” We met in our opium den of a dorm room, its windows blacked out with Indian batiks that forced me to use an alarm to wake for classes, and when it was my turn to confess my prejudices, I announced that I had none. My roommate kicked me out. I rigged up an “independent concentration” in Comparative Commercial Culture—as close as a kid could get to going square there—and bought a nice glowing Timex and started wearing it.

  “I’m sorry to hear you feel that way,” I say. “If your work’s beneath you, you should change professions.” Maybe we’re bound for conflict, after all.

  Alex produces, from somewhere, a small inhaler, and mists her lungs with steroids. Her color changes. Not for the better, necessarily.

  “I already have. Events are my act two. It’s not the job, it’s the clients who wear me out. This lady senator. A power bitch. She sent back my sketches of the floral arrangements with big black X’s through them and a note: ‘More funereal, please.’ Can you believe it? Her poor old husband’s beheaded by a speedboat and she sees a fund-raising gimmick.”

  “A Democrat?”

  “You’ve got it. I ought to switch parties.”

  “They’re both corrupt.”

  “Disempowerment machines,” she says.

  She’s speaking my language now. Maybe she’s read Sandy Pinter, or read of him. Maybe there are layers to this Alex.

  “So what do you do?” she says.

  I leave out my work in CTC and play up my infrequent coaching jobs, using my Reno assignment to illustrate. It’s a canned presentation: the Art Krusk story. Retired army tank captain and cancer survivor opens modest Mexican buffet featuring mariachis and wife’s recipes. Expands his operation with borrowed money, staying one step ahead of swelling debt load by targeting growing market: young working families. Institutes generous compensation plan to retain top employees but overshoots, breeding widespread resentment when he scales back. Absenteeism follows. An act of sabotage: the suspected contamination of spiced ground meat with human feces. The resulting E. coli outbreak sickens dozens and tarnishes Krusk’s name. Among my recommendations: a company sports league to raise morale and, on the public relations front, sponsorship of medical “scholarships” for needy local children.

  A snack is served: bagel sandwiches of ham or turkey dressed with mayonnaise and lettuce leaves. Alex asks questions, good ones, about Krusk’s case, probing the fine points of Brand Reconstruction—a term she actually uses. She’s with me, frowning and nodding, synthesizing. It orders her features, draws life into her eyes.

  When I’m finished, Alex tells me about herself. She hails from a town in Wyoming, as small as mine, whose claim to fame is the time a local deputy stopped Robert Redford for speeding. I can top this. Back in Polk Center we had a doctor, a friend of my father’s through the Shriners lodge, who specialized in medically questionable oversize breast implants. He once performed surgery on a president’s mistress. We knew this because the local Western Union handled a White House get-well telegram. The clerk made a copy and tucked it in the files of the county history museum, where my father took me to view it as a teenager, explaining that it was important for young men to see through the saintly posturings of their leaders.

  “Wise parent,” Alex says.

  “I miss him badly.”

  “When did he pass away?”

  “Six years ago.”

  I feel the syrup well up and stop myself. My memories of my happy youth confuse people—they can’t tell if I’m bragging, kidding, or crazy. It’s a problem for me, a curious burden: my golden Mark Twain boyhood of State Fair corn dogs and station wagon vacations to Yellowstone. So few shadows, so much, such varied, light. The autumn radiance of sunset boxcars bearing away the grain of Lewis County; the midsummer glare off the fenders of my Schwinn. And my father, the seeming source of all this light, dressed in Red Wing boots and Carhartt coveralls as he strode out at dawn to his truck, a yellow supercab, and woke the town to another day of work. His deliveries fueled the county’s furnaces and heated its morning showers. He warmed the world.

  But who wants to hear this? No one. I used to try. I tried in the creative writing seminar. A girl half my age said “Show, don’t tell.” It’s pointless.

  Alex peels the turkey from her bagel, folds the slice in half, in half again, wraps the whole package in lettuce, and bites down. I admire her willingness to take what’s given and improve on it. It’s a traveler’s trait, and I ask her how much she flies. Her numbers are medium: sixty thousand miles in twelve months, all domestic, on Delta and United. Her preferred lodgings are Courtyard Marriotts, although she agrees that Homestead Suites offers an equal value and better food. She opens her wallet and out falls an accordion of clear vinyl pockets holding her VIP cards.

  “You’re satisifed with Avis?”

  “I am,” she says.

  “They’re stingy with the miles. I like Maestro.”

  “Maestro keeps its vehicles too long. If a car’s over twenty-thousand, I get nervous.”

  “That new outfit, Colonial, isn’t bad.”

  “No instant checkout. I like to park and go. A question,” she says. “Have you ever flown with pets?”

  “I don’t keep pets, but I wouldn’t fly with them. The climate controls in the holds are always wacky.”

  Alex’s face sags. “My new cat’s along. I couldn’t bear to leave him. An Abyssinian.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine. Is he tranquilized?”

  “One pill. It’s a human prescription. Are animal doses different?”

  We descend into Elko through layered sheets of smoke. The Sierras are burning this summer, from Tahoe south, and the sun, which has just ticked over into the west, glows hot pink in my window. Bad news for Alex. Reno is even closer to the fires, though she tells me that smoke doesn’t bother her, just chemicals. She used to think her allergies were emotional, a product of childhood tension, she says, but now she blames them on solvents, glues, and dyes. She’d like to remain inside to get her breath back, so she asks if I’ll check on her kitten with the ground crew.

  “Want anything from the terminal? Milky Way?”

  “Have to trim down. Can’t risk it.”

  “Understood.”

  “I try to go light on the carbs when I’m out traveling.”

  “It affects the digestion, no doubt about it. Smart. With me it’s fats and oils. My scalp breaks out.”

  “Take chromium tablets.”

  “I have. I’ve tried them all.”

  A ground worker, sportily dressed in shorts and cap and looking content, for once, with his union contract, pushes a wheeled staircase against the exit. Stopping off in transit beats arriving. There’s the feeling of visiting an island, of stepping, briefly and sweetly, out of time into a scene you’ve had absolutely no hand in and have no designs on, no intentions toward. A truly neutral charge is tough to find in life, and that’s how Elko feels as I deplane: irrelevant and tranquil. A mirage.

  On the tarmac I notice a pet crate being unloaded—to give its occupant water, I assume. I approach, but the baggage handler waves me off. Restricted zone. “The cat okay?” I yell. The handler doesn’t answer, too much engine noise, but something in his face concerns me as I watch him crouch, unlatch the crate, and reach one arm inside. He flags down a coworker driving a cart and together they peer through the grating at the kitten.

  The second man stands and comes over to me.
“Yours?”

  “A friend’s. Is it okay?”

  “Has it been tranquilized?”

  “Just one pill.”

  “It’s acting awfully sluggish. Make sure it gets more water first thing in Reno.”

  I pass through the cinder-block terminal, acknowledging one or two Great West employees whose faces I remember from other trips. By rotating its personnel, who pop up again and again in different cities, the airline creates a sense in flyers like me of running in place. I find this reassuring.

  I head for the gift shop. According to my HandStar, Art Krusk has two young daughters, five and nine. I scan the shelves for souvenirs and pick out two figurines of rearing mustangs. Don’t all girls love horses? Sure they do. My sisters were horse-obsessed well into their teens, when my mother cut back on their riding as a way to stimulate interest in boys. They hated her for it. My mother was a scientific parent; she’d taught third grade before she married my father. She believed in stages of development. Under her system, keyed to crucial birthdays, teddy bears disappeared when kids turned eight, replaced by clarinets or swimming lessons. She had us baptized at ten, confirmed at twelve, and bought us subscriptions to Newsweek at fourteen. How she settled on Newsweek I don’t know.

  The gift shop lady, a buzzardy old gal with nicotine fingers and casino eyes, slides my credit card through her machine. I can tell she’d rather I pay in cash so she can skim a few bucks to play the slots.

  “Refused,” she says.

  “That’s impossible.”

  She shrugs. “Want to try another one?”

  I don’t. The card is the only one that pays me miles and enters me in a contest for a new Audi. “Try it over. It’ll work this time.”

  Since my payments are current, there has to be a glitch. But maybe my payments aren’t current. I think back. The last load of mail delivered to my old address showed signs of mishandling. Two torn envelopes. Was there a credit card bill? I don’t remember. I put through a forwarding order ten days ago listing my office at ISM—I think—but as of last Friday nothing had arrived.