English Essay

The G i r I on the

PI an e

John Morton came down the aisle of the plane, banging his luggage into people's knees and sweating angrily under his suit. He had just run through the corridors of the airport, cursing and struggling with his luggage, slipping and flailing in front of the vapid brat at the seat assignmenJ: desk. Too winded to speak, he thrust his ticket at the boy and readjusted his luggage in his sticky hands. ''You're a little late for a seat assignment," Said the kid snottily. "!hope you can get on board before it pulls away."

He took his boarding pass and said, "Thanks, you little prick." The boy's discomfiture was made more obvious by his pretense of hauteur; it both soothed and fed John's anger.·

At least he was able to stuff his bags into the compartment above the first seat he found. He sat down, grunting territorially; and his body slowly eased into a normal dull pulse and ebb. He looked at his watch; desk attendant to the contrary; the plane was sitting stupidiy still, twenty minutes after takeoff time. He had the ple-asing fantasy of punching the little bastard's face.

He was always just barely making his flight. His wife had read in one of her magazines that habitual lateness meant lack of interest in life or depression or something. Well, who could blame him for lack of interest in the crap he was dealing with?

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He glanced at the guy a seat away from him on the left, an alco- holic-looking old shark in an expensive suit, who sat staring fixedly at a magazine _photograph of a grinning blonde in a white jumpsuit. The plane continued to sit there, while stewardesses fiddled with compartments and women rolled up and down the aisles on trips to the bathroom. They were even boardlng a passenger; a woman had just entered, flushed and vigorously banging along the aisle with her luggage. She was very pretty, and he watched her, his body still fee- bly sending off alarm signals in response to its forced run.

"Hi," she said. 'Tm in the middle there." "By all means." The force of his anger entered his magnanimity

and swelled it hugely; he pinched his ankles together to let her by. She put her bag under the seat in front of her, sat down, and rested her booted feet on its pale leather. The old shark by the window glanced appraisingly at her breasts through her open coat. He looked up at her face and made smile movements. The stewardess dld her parody of a suffocating person reaching for an air mask, the pilot mumbled, the plane prepared to assert its unnatural presence in

nature. "They said I'd missed my flight by fifteen minutes," she said. "But

I knew I'd make it. They're never on time." Her voice was unexpect- edly small, with a rough, gravelly undertone that was seedy and

schoolgirlish at once. "It's bullshit," he said.:.:.'·Well, what can you dol" She had large

hazel eyes. She smlled a tight, rueful smlle that he associated with women

who'd been fucked too many times and which he found sexy. She cuddled more deeply into her seat, produced a People magazine, and intently read it. He liked her profile-which was an interesting com- bination of soft (forehead, chin) and sharp (nose, cheekbones)-her shoulder-length, pale-brown hair, and her soft Medlterranean skin. He liked the coarse quality in the subtle downturn of her lips. and the heavy way her lids sat on her eyes. She was older than he'd origi- nally thought, probably in her early thirties.

Who did she remind him ofl A girl from a long time ago, an older version of some date or crush or screw. Or love, he thought gamely.

The pilot said they would be leaving the ground shortly. She was

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now reading a feature that appeared to be about the wedding of two people who had AIDS. He thought of his wife, at home in Min- neapolis, at the stove poking at something, in the living room read- ing, the fuzzy pink of her favorite sweater. The plane charged and tore a hole in the air.

He reviewed his mental file of girls he'd known before his wife and paused at the memory of Andrea, the girl who'd made an ass- hole of him. It had been tvyelve years, and only now could he say that phrase to himself, the only phrase that accurately described the situ- ation. With stale resentment, he regarded her: a pale, long-legged thing with huge gray eyes, a small mouth, long red hair, and the helpless manner of a pampered pet let loose in the wilderness.

The woman next to him was hurriedly flipping the pages of Peo- ple, presumably looking for something as engrossing as the AIDS wedding. When she didn't find it, she closed the magazine and turned to him in a way that invited conversation.

She said she'd lived in L.A. for eight years and that she liked it, even though it was "gross."

'Tve never been to L.A.," he said. "I picture it being like L.A. Law. Is it like that?"

"I don't know. I've never seen L.A. Law. I don't watch TV I don't own one."

He had never known a person who didn't own a TV, not even an old high school friend who lived in a slum and got food stamps. "You must read the newspapers a lot."

"No. I don't read them much at all." He was incredulous. "How do you connect with the rest of the

world? How do you know anything?" 'T m part of the world. I know a lot of things." He expelled a snort of laughter. "That's an awfully small perspec-

tive you've got there." She shrugged and turned her head, and he was sorry he'd been

rude. He glanced at her profile to read her expression and-of course; she reminded him of Patty LaForge, poor Patty.

He had met Patty at Meadow Community College in Coate, Min- nesota. He was in his last semester; she had just entered. They

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worked in the student union cafeteria, preparing, serving, and snack~ ing on denatured food. She was a slim, curvy person with dark-blond hair, hazel eyes, and remarkable legs and hips. Her beaury was spoiled by the aggressive resigoation that held her features in a fixed position and made all her expressions stiff Her full mouth had a bit- ter downturn, and her voice was quick, low, self-deprecating, and sarcastic. She presented her beautiful body statically, as if it were a shield, and the effort of this presentation seemed to be the source of her animation.

Most of the people he knew at Meadow were kids he'd gone to high school and even junior high with. They still lived at home and still drove their cars around together at night, drank in the small bars of Coate, adventured in Minneapolis, and made love to each other. This late-adolescent camaraderie gave their time at Meadow a fraught emotional qualiry that was like the shimmering fullness of a bead of water before it falls. They were all about to scatter and become different from one another, and this made them exult in their closeness and alikeness.

The woman on the plane was flying to Kentucky to visit her parents and stopping over in Cincinnati.

"Did you grow up in Kentucky?" he asked. He imagined her as a big-eyed child in a cotton shift, playing in some dusry, sunny alley, some rural Kentucky-lik~ plate. Funny she had grown up t?. be this wan little bun with too much makeup in black creases under her eyes.

"No. I was born there, but I grew up mostly in Minnesota, near Minneapolis."

He turned away, registered the little shock of coincidence, and turned back. The situation compounded: she had gone to Redford Community College in Thorold, a suburb much like Coate. She had grown up in Thorold, like Patty. The only reason Patry had gone to Meadow was that Redford didn't exist yet.

He felt a surge of commonality. He imagined that she had experi- enced his adolescence, and this made him experience it for a moment. He had loved walking the small, neat walkways of the campus through the stiffly banked hedges of snow and harsh morn-

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ing austerity, entering the close, food-smelling student union with the hard winter air popping off his skin. He would see his friends standing in a conspiratorial huddle, warming their hands on cheap cups of coffee; he always remembered the face of a particular girl, Layla, turning to greet him, looking over her frail sloped shoulder, her hair a bunched dark tangle, her round eyes ringed with green pencil, her perfectly ordlnary face compelling in its configurations of girlish cur!osiry, maternal license, sexual knowledge, forgiveness, and femininity. A familiar mystery he had meant to explore some- time and never did, except when he grabbed her butt at a Halloween parry and she smiled like a mother of four who worked as a porn model on the side. He loved driving with his friends to the Red Owl to buy alcohol and bagged salry snacks, which they consumed as they drove around Coate playing the tape deck and yelling at each other, the beautiful ordinary landscape unpeeling before them, revealing the essential strangeness of its shadows and night move- ments. He loved driving with girls to the deserted housing develop- ment they called "the Spot," loved the blurred memories of the girls in the back seat with their naked legs curled up to their chests, their shirts bunched about their necks, their eyes wide with ardor and alcohol, beer and potato chips spilled on the floor of the car, the tape deck singing of love and triumph. He getting out of the car for a tri- umphant piss, while the girl daintily replaced her pants. In the morn- ing his mother would make him "cowboy eggs," eggs fried on top of bacon, and he would go through the cold to Meadow, to sit in a fluo- rescent classroom and dream.

"Did you like growing up in that area?" she asked. "Like it? It was the greatest time of my life." Some extremity in

his voice made her look away, and as she did, he looked more fully at her profile. She didn't look that much like Patry; she wasn't even blond. But the small physical resemblance was augmented by a less tangible affinity, a telling similarity of speech and movement.

Patry belonged to a different crowd at Meadow. They were rougher than the Coate people, but the two groups were friendly. Patry was a

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strange, still presence within her group, with her hip thrust out and a cigarette always bleeding smoke from her hand. She was loose even by seventies standards; she had a dirty sense of humor, and she wore pants so tight you could see the swollen outline of her genitals. She was also shy. When she talked she pawed the ground with her foot and pulled her hair over her mouth; she looked away from you and then snuck a look back to see what you thought of her. She was accepted by the Thorold people the way you accept what you've always known. The stiffness of her face and body contradicting her loose reputation, her coarse language expressed in her timid voice and shy manners, her beauty and her ordinariness, all gave her a dis- connected sexiness that was aggravating.

But he liked her. They were often a team at work, and he enjoyed having her next to him, her golden-haired arms plunged in greasy black dishwater or flecked with garbage as she plucked silverware from vile plates on their way to the dishwasher. She spooned out quivering redJell-0 or drew long bland snakes of soft ice cream from the stainless-steel machine, she smoked, wiped her nose, and mut- tered about a fight with her mother or a bad date. Her movements were resigned and bitter, yet her eyes and her nasty humor peeked impishly from under this weight. There was something pleasing in this combination, something congruent with her spoiled beauty.

It was a long time before he realized she had a crush on him. All her conversation was briti,ded together with a fly strip of different boys she had been with or was involved with, and she talked of all of them with the same tone of fondness and resentment. He thought nothing of it when she followed him outside to the field behind the union, where they would walk along the narrow wet ditch, smoking pot and talking. It was early spring; dark, naked trees pressed intensely against the horizon, wet weeds clung to their jeans, and her small voice bobbed assertively on the vibrant air. The cold wind gave her lips a swollen raw look and made her young skin grainy and bleached. "So why do you let him treat you like that?" 'Ah, I get back at him. It's not really him, you know, I'm just fixated on him. I'm working out something through him. Besides, he's a great lay." He never noticed how often she came up behind him to walk him to class or sat on the edge of his chair as he lounged in the union. Then

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one day she missed work, and a buddy of his said, "Hey, where's your little puppy dog today?" and he knew.

"Did you like Thorold?" he asked the girl next to him. "No, I didn't." She turned toward him, her face a staccato burst of

candor. "I didn't know what I was doing, and I was a practicing alco- holic. I kept trying to fit in and I couldn't."

"That doesn't sound good." He smiled. How like Patty to answer a polite question from a stranger with this emotional nakedness, this urgent excess of information. She was always doing that, especially after the job at the cafeteria ended. He'd see her in a hallway or the union lounge, where normal life was happening all around them, and she'd swoop into a compressed communication, intently twin- ing her hair around her finger as she quickly muttered that she'd had the strangest dream about this guy David, in which a nuclear war was going on, and he, John, was in it too, and-

'What did you do after Redford?" he asked the girl next to him. "Screwed around, basically: I went to New York pretty soon after

that and did the same things I was doing in Thorold. Except I was trying to be a singer."

"Yeah?" He felt buoyed by her ambition. He pictured her in a tight black dress, lips parted, eyes closed, bathed in cheap, sexy stage light. "Didja ever do anything with it?"

"Not much." She abruptly changed expression, as though she'd just remembered not to put herself down. 'Well, some stuff. I had a good band 011ce, we played the club circuit in L.A. for a while six years ago." She paused. "But I'm mostly a paralegal now."

"Well, that's not bad, either. Do you ever sing now?" "I haven't fur a long time. But I was thinking of trying again." Just

like Patty. she looked away and quickly looked back as if to check his reaction. Tve been auditioning. Even though ... I don't know."

"It sounds great to me," he said. '~t least you're trying. It sounds better than what I do." His self-deprecation annoyed him, and he hulled his way through an explanation of what he did, making it sound more interesting than selling software.

A stewardess with a small pink face asked if they'd like anything

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to drink, and he ordered two little bottles of Jack Daniel's. Patty's shadow had a compressed can of orange juice and an unsavory packet of nu~s; their silent companion by the window had vodka straight. He thought of asking her if she was married, but he bet the answer was no, and he didn't want to make her admit her loneliness.

Of course, not every single person was lonely, but he guessed that she was. She seemed in need Of comfort and care, like a stray animal that gets fed by various kindly people but never held.

"Will you get some mothering while you're at home?" he asked. "Ob, yes. My mother will make things I like to eat and ... stuff

like that." He thought of telling her that she reminded him of someone he'd

known in Coate, but he dldn't. He sat silently, knocking back his whiskey and watching her roll a greasy peanut between two fingers.

Out in the field, they were sitting on a fallen branch, sharing a wet stub of pot. "I don't usually say stuff like this," said Patty. "I know you think I do, because of the way I talk, but I don't. But I'm really attracted to you, John." The wind blew a piece of hair across her cheek, and its texture contrasted acutely with her cold-bleached skin.

"Yeah, I was beginning to notice." "I guess it was kind of obvious, huh?" She looked down and drew

her curtain of hair. 'And I've been getting these mixed signals from you. I can't tell if you're ~.t!r.acted to me or not." She paused. "But I guess you're not, hub('

Her humility embarrassed and touched him. "Well, I am attracted to you. Sort of. I mean, you're beautiful and everything. I'm just not attracted enough to do anything. Besides, there's

Susan." "Oh. I thought you didn't like her that much." She sniffed and

dropped the roach on the raw grass; her lipstick had congealed into little chapped bumps on her lower lip. "Well, I'm really disappointed.

I thought you liked me." "I do like you, Patty" "You know what I meant." Pause. "]' m more attracted to you

than I've been to anybody for two years. Since Paul." A flattered giggle escaped him.

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'Well, I hope we can be friends," she said. "We can still talk and stuff, can't we?"

"Patty LaForge? I wouldn't touch her, man. The smell alone." He was driving around with a carload of drunk boys who were

filled with a tangle of goodwill and aggression. ':Ah, LaForge is okay." He was indignant for Patty. but he laughed anyway.

"Were you really an alcoholic when you lived in Thorold?" he asked. "I still am, I just don't drink now. But then I did. Yeah." He had stepped into a conversation that had looked nice and solid

and his foot had gone through the floor and into the basement. Bu~ he couldn't stop. "I guess I drank too much then too. But it wasn't a problem. We just had a lot of fun."

She smiled with tight, terse mystery. "How come you told me that about yourself? It seems kind of

personal." He attached his gaze to hers as he said this; sometimes women said personal things to you as a way of coming on.

But instead of becoming soft and encouraging, her expression turned proper and institutional, like a kid about to recite. "If I'm going to admit it to other alcoholics in the program, I can admit it in regular life too. It humbles you, sort of."

What a bunch of shit, he thought.

He was drinking with some guys at the Winners Circle, a rough pickup bar, when suddenly Patty walked up to him, really drunk.

'John," she gasped. 'John, John, John." She lurched at him and attached her nail-bitten little claws to his jacket. 'John, this guy over there really wants to fuck me, and I was going to go with him, but I dOn't want him, I want you, I want you." Her voice wrinkled into a squeak, her face looked like you could smear it with your hand.

"Patty," he mumbled, "you're drunk." "That's not why. I always feel like this." Her nose and eyelashes

and lips touched his cheek in an alcoholic caress. 'Just let me kiss you. Just hold me."

He put his hands on her shoulders. "C'mon, stop it."

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"It doesn't have to mean anything. You don't have to love me. I

love you enough for both of us." He felt thepresence of his smirking friends. "Patty; these guys are

laughing at you. I'll see you later." He tried to push her away. "I don't care. I love you, John. I mean it." She pressed her taut

body against his, one sweaty hand under his shirt, and arched her neck until he could see the small veins and bones. "Please. Just be with me. Please." Her hand stroked him, groped between his legs. He took her shoulders and shoved her harder than he had meant to. She staggered back, fell against a table, knocked down a chair, and almost fell again. She straightened and looked at him as if she'd

known him and hated him all her life.

He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, an overweight, prema- turely balding salesman getting drunk on an airplane.

"Look at the clouds," said the girl next to him. ':Aren't they beau-

tiful?" He opened his eyes and silently looked. Shrewdness glimmered under her gaze. "What's your name?" he asked. · "Lorraine." Tm John." He extended his hand and she took it, her eyes

unreadable, her hand exuding sweet feminine sweat. "Why do you want to:_talk about your alcoholism publicly? I

mean, if nobody asks_oi anything?" · Her eyes were steadfast, but her body was hesitant. "Well, I didn't

have to just now. It's just the first thing I thought of when you asked me about Thorold. In general, it's to remind me. It's easy to bullshit

yourself that you don't have a problem." He thought of the rows and rows of people in swivel chairs on

talk-show stages, admitting their problems. Wife beaters, child abusers, dominatrixes, porn stars. In the past it probably was a hum- bling experience to stand up and tell people you were an alcoholic. Now it was just something else to talk about. He remembered Patty tottering through a crowded party on smudged red high heels, brag- ging about what great blow jobs she gave. Some girl rolled her eyes

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and said, "Oh, no, not again." Patty disappeared into a bedroom with a bottle of vodka and Jack Spannos.

He remembered a conversation with his wife before he married her, a conversation about his bachelor party. "It was no women allowed," he'd told her. "Unless they wanted to give blow jobs."

"Couldn't they just jump naked out of a cake?" she asked. "Nope. Blow jobs for everybody." They were at a festive restaurant, drinking margaritas. Nervously,

she touched her tiny straws. "Wouldn't that be embarrassing? In front of each other? I i:an't imagine Henry doing that in front of you all."

He smiled at the mention of his shy friend in this context. ''Yeah," he said. "It probably would be embarrassing. Group sex is for teenagers."

Her face rose away frnm her glass in a kind of excited alarm, her lips par:ed. "You had group sex when you were a teenager?"

"Oh. Not really. Just a gang bang once." She looked like an antelope testing the wind with its nose in the

air, ready to fly. "It wasn't rape," she said. "Oh, no, no." Her body relaxed and released a warm, sensual

curiosity, like a cat against his leg. "The girl liked it." '1\.re you sure?'' ''Yeah. She liked having sex with a lot of guys. We all knew her,

she knew us." He felt her shiver inwardiy, shocked and fascinated by this danger-

ous pack-animal aspect of his masculinity. "What was it like?" she asked. He shrugged. "It was a good time with the guys. It was a bunch of

guys standing around in their socks and underwear."

Some kid he didn't know walked up and put his arm around him while he was talking to a girl named Chrissie. The kid's eyes were boyish and drunkenly enthusiastic, his face heavy and porous. He whispered something about Patty in John's ear and said, "C'mon."

The girl's expression subtly withdrew. "What?" said John.

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"Come on," said the kid. "Bye-bye," said Chrissie, with a gingerly wag of her fingers. He followed the guy through the room, seizing glimpses of hips

and tits sheathed in bright, cheap cloth, girls doing wiggly dances with guys who jogged helplessly from foot to foot, holding their chests proudly aloof from their lower bodies. On the TV, a pretty girl gyrated in her black bra, sending a clean bolt of sex into the room. The music made his organs want to leap in and out of his body in

time. His friends were all around him. A door opened and closed behind him, muffling the music. The

kid who'd brought him in sat in an armchair, smiling. Patty lay on a bed with her skirt pulled up to her waist and a guy with his pants down straddling her face. Without knowing why, he laughed. Patty twisted her legs about and bucked slightly. For a moment he felt frightened that this was against her will-but no, she would have screamed. He recognized the boy on her as Pete Kopiekin, who was thrusting his flat, hairy butt in the same dogged, earnest, woeful manner with which he played football. His heart was pounding.

Kopiekin got off her and the other guy got on; between them he saw her chin sticking up from her sprawled body, pivoting to and fro on her neck while she muttered and groped blindly up and down her body. Kopiekin opened the door to leave, and a fist of music punched the room. John's body jumped in shocked response, and the door shut. The guy on top of. Patty was talking to her; to John's amaze- ment, he seemed to beusing love words. "You're so beautiful, baby." He saw Patty's hips moving. She wasn't being raped, he thought. When the guy finished, he stood and poured the rest of his beer in

her face. "Hey," said John lamely, "hey." "Oh, man, don't tell me that. I've known her a long time." When the guy left, he thought of wiping her face, but he didn't.

She sighed fitfully and rolled on her side, as if there was something under the mattress, disturbing her sleep, but she was too tired to remove it. His thoughts spiraled inward, and he let them be chopped up by muffled guitar chords. He sat awhile, watching guys swarm over Patty and talking to the ones waiting. Music sliced in and out of the room. Then some guy wanted to pour maple syrup on her, and

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John said, "No, I didn't go yet." He sat on the bed and, for the first time, looked at her, expecting to see the sheepish bitter look he knew. He didn't recognize her. Her rigid face was weirdly slack; her eyes fluttered open, rolled, and closed; a mix of half-formed expres- sions flew across her face like swarming ghosts. "Patty," he said, "hey." He shook her shoulder. Her eyes opened, her gaze raked his face. He saw tenderness, he thought. He lay on her and tried to embrace her. Her body was leaden and floppy. She muttered and moved, but in ways he didn't understand. He massaged her breasts; they felt like they could come off and she wouldn't notice.

He lay there, supporting himself on his elbows, and felt the deep breath in her lower body meeting his own bteath. Subtly, he felt her come to life. She lifted her head and said something; he heard his name. He kissed her on the lips. Her tongue touched his, gently, her sleeping hands woke. He held her and stroked her pale, beautiful face.

He got up in such a good mood that he slapped the guy coming in with the maple syrup a high five, something he thought was stupid and usually never did.

The hext time he saw Patty was at a Foreigner concert in Min- neapolis; he saw her holding hands with Pete Kopiekin.

Well, now she could probably be on a talk show about date rape. It was a confusing thing. She may have wanted to kiss him or to give Jack Spannos a blow job, but she probably didn't want maple syrup poured on her. Really, though, if you were going to get blind drunk and let everybody fuck you, you had to expect some nasty stuff On the talk shows they always said it was low self-esteem that made them do it. If he had low self-esteem, he sure wouldn't try to cure it like that. His eyes rested on Lorraine's hands; she was wadding the empty nut package and stuffing it in her empty plastic cup.

"Hey," he said,· "what did you mean when you said you kept try- ing to fit in and you couldn't? When you were in Thorold?"

"Oh, you know." She seemed impatient. 'Acting the part of the pretty, sexy girl."

"When in fact you were not a pretty, sexy girl?" She started to smile, then caught his expression and gestured dis-

rnissively. "It was complicated."

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It was seductive, the way she drew him in and then shut him out. She picked up her magazine again. Her slight arm movement released a tiny cloud of sweat and deodorant, which evaporated as soon as he inhaled it. He breathed in deeply, hoping to smell her again. Sunlight pressed in with viral intensity and exaggerated the lovely contours of her face, the fine lines, the stray cosmetic flecks, the marvelous profusion of her pores. He thought of the stories he'd read in sex magazines about strangers on airplanes having sex in the bathroom or masturbating each other under blankets.

The stewardess made a sweep with a gaping white garbage bag and cleared their trays of bottles and cups.

She put down the magazine. 'You've probably had the same expe- rience yourself," she said. Her face was cBriously determined, as if it were very important that she make herself understood. "I mean doing stuff for other people's expectations or just to feel you have a social identity because you're so convinced who you are isn't right."

"You mean low self-esteem?" "Well, yeah, but more than that." He sensed her inner tension and

felt an empathic twitch. "It's just that you get so many projections onto yourself of who

and what you're supposed to be that if you don't have a strong sup- port system it's hard to process it."

'Yeah," he said. "I know what you mean. I've had that experience. I don't know how you ca!Ct have it when you're young. There's so much crap in the world." He felt embarrassed, but he kept tallting, wanting to tell her something about himself, to return her candor. "''ve done lots of things I wish I hadn't done, I've made mistakes. But you can't let it rule your life."

She smiled again, with her mouth only, "Once, a few years ago, my father asked me what I believed to be the worst mistakes in my life. This is how he thinks, this is his favorite kind of question. Any- way, it was really hard to say; because I don't know frorri this vantage point what would've happened if I'd done otherwise in most situa- tions. Finally, I came up with two things: my relationship with this guy named Jerry and the time I turned down an offer to work with this really awful band that became famous. He was totally bewil- dered. He was expecting me to say ·dropping out of college.' "

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'You didn't make a mistake dropping out of college." The vehe- mence in his voice almost made him blush; then nameless urgency swelled forth and quelled embarrassment. "That wasn't a mistake," he repeated.

"Well, yeah, I know." "Excuse me." The silent business shark to their left rose in majes-

tic self-containment and moved awkwardly past their knees, looking at John with pointed irony as he did so. Puck you, thought John.

'1\.nd about that relationship," he went on. "That wasn't your loss. It was his." He had meant these words to sound light and playfully gallant, but they had the awful intensity of a maudlin personal con- fession. He reached out to gently pat her hand, to reassure her that he wasn't a nut, but instead he grabbed it and held it. "If you want to talk about mistakes-shit, I raped somebody. Somebody I liked."

Their gaze met in a conflagration of reaction. She was so close he could srpell her sweating, but at the speed of light she was falling away, deep into herself where he couldn't follow. She was struggling to free her hand.

"No," he said, "it wasn't a real rape. It was what you were tallting about-it was complicated.''

She wrenched her hand free and held it protectively close to her chest. "Don't touch me again." She turned tautly forward. He imag- ined her heart beating in alarm. His body felt so stiff he could barely feel his own heart. Furiously, he wondered if the people around them had heard any of this. Staring ahead of him, he hissed, "Do you think I was dying to hear about your alcoholism? You were the one who Started this crazy conversation."

He felt her consider this. "It's not the same thing," she hissed back. "But it wasn't really a rape." He struggled to say what it was. He

recalled Patty that night at the Winners Circle, her neck arched and exposed, her . feelings extended and flailing the air where she expected his feelings to be.

'You don't understand," he finished lamely. She was silent. He thought he dimly felt her body relax, emitting

some possibility of forgiveness. But he couldn't tell. He closed his eyes. He thought of Patty's splayed body, her half-conscious kiss. He thought of his wife, her compact scrappy body, her tough-looking

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flat nose and chipped nail polish, her smile, her smell, her embrace, which was both soft and fierce. He imagined the hotel room he would sleep .in tonight, its stifling grid of rectangles, oblongs, and windows that wouldn't open. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

The pilot roused him with a command to fasten his seat belt. He sat up and blinked. Nothing had changed. The woman at his side was sitting slightly hunched, with her hands resolutely clasped.

"God, I'll be glad when we're on the ground," he said. She sniffed in reply. They descended, ears popping. They landed with a flurry of bag·

gage-grabbing. He stood, bumped his head, and tried to get into the aisle to escape, but it was too crowded. He sat back down. Not being able to leave made him feel that he had to say something else. "Look, don't be upset. What I said came out wrong."

"I don't want to talk." Neither do I, he thought. But he felt disoriented and depressed

amid these shifting, lunging, grabbing people from all over the conn· try; who had been in his life for hours and were now about to disap· pear, taking their personal items and habits with them.

"Excuse me." She butted her way past him and into the aisle. He watched a round, vuinerable piece of her head move between the obstructions of shoulders and arms. She glanced backward, possibly to see if he was going to try to follow her. The sideways movement of her hazel iris prickl~d hiin. They burst from the plane and scat· tered, people picking up speed as they bore down on their destina· tion. He caught up with her as they entered the terminaL T m sorry," he said to the back of her head. She moved farther away, into memory and beyond.

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