by Daniel Riley
Then Suzy asks a question.
“How’d you end up teaching? You’ve gotta be so much younger than most instructors, yeah?”
“Just talked to some people at Zamperini.” He pauses and the volume of their cruising speed seems dialed up in the cockpit. “Pretty straightforward.”
“But you flew in Vietnam. Is that a normal thing? To end up doing something like this?”
“Not terribly normal.”
“But you like it.…”
“You teach, you get paid, you make new pilots out of people who might be willing to rent your plane at a decent hourly.” Suzy purses her lips and bobs, semisatisfied. He turns and considers her face, the bait of her lingering skepticism. “I had some trouble, if that’s what you’re asking. Flunked some tests you’re not allowed to flunk if you want to work your way up the ranks. When you do that, you sorta limit your options. If you want to keep flying, there aren’t a whole lot of opportunities.”
“Even though you’re good at what you do, specialized—that’s what you said that first class, right? They don’t have a use for you?”
“You’re not supposed to do what I did.”
“What—booze, blow? Drunk driving?”
He flips in his seat and flashes two mirrored aviator lenses in her direction. “How ’bout we get back to me asking the questions.” Suzy squinches her nose and smiles to herself. Her hands are still on the yoke. She starts to think about him being “under the weather” a couple classes in a row, wonders what life’s really like for Millikan during the 166 hours a week they’re not together.
“Yes, sir.”
“What about that there, that’s a good one to know,” he says. “What’s that telling you—the flight recorder?”
Suzy scans the dash and finds the instrument. She doesn’t know what he’s getting at.
“It tells you how long you’ve been flying.…”
“More importantly,” he says, “it tells you how much you owe the owner of the plane for your joyride. It’s a good one to keep an eye on.”
On the first leg of the out-and-back to New York, the pilot comes on to say they may need to make an unexpected landing. They’ve already been squeezed onto a southern route by weather over the Rockies, but this is more severe, more urgent. My God, Suzy thinks, it’s happening again. She’s in the back of the plane brewing coffee when the announcement splits the silence of the cabin. At once there’s the flare-up of a collective murmur, the sound of a lit stove top. None of the passengers in the back seem to be seeking her attention, but she can’t quite see all the way to the front. The other three girls are near the cockpit, and she makes a line forward, cautiously, pacifically.
“Miss, what is it?” says a woman in a yellow dress. Suzy can tell she’s shaped like a papaya.
“I’m heading up to check. It’s all under control.”
Each row she passes, though, she scans for signs that would suggest otherwise: bags with explosives, overstuffed shirts, shaky hands, sweaty eyes. And yet nothing presents itself ringed in red. There’s an empty seat just before she reaches business class, a window seat she’s sure was occupied. She closes her eyes tightly in an attempt to visualize the manifest, as though the darker she can make her mind, the better the odds of developing an image of the list of names and their associated faces.
But she comes up blank. And so she moves deeper toward the front of the cabin, watches the doors of the cockpit carefully. She doesn’t want to startle anyone should the doors open suddenly. She passes the compartment with her bag. What happens if she fails to make a delivery? She can’t be held responsible under these circumstances, can she?
She’s nearly to the front of the plane, eyeing the compartment, wondering if the hijackers could possibly know about the haul. The run to pay back Billy. There’s quiet up front—the three stews are seated. This confuses Suzy. But her confusion is cut off by the giant whoosh beside her, an imbalance of pressure, the cabin door unsealing, or some such equivalent. It springs her stomach. But then it settles, fizzy still but blushing, too. Someone’s flushed the toilet. Suzy steps aside, out of the way, and the elderly woman belonging to the missing seat returns to her window.
Suzy presses in to the head stew and whispers softly so that the first-class passengers don’t overhear.
“Is everything okay?”
“What?” Marcy shouts.
“Is everything…,” Suzy says at the same unhelpful volume. Then: “What’s going on?”
“Weather,” Marcy says.
“Weather?”
“Gulf storm,” Marcy says, shouting still.
“Nothing else, no other problems…”
“Don’t look so spooked.”
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain.…” And he proceeds to explain. A late-season gulf hurricane has slowed its metabolic rate and turned into a mean, doughy central-Texas mess of shit that’s forcing all planes in the area down to the ground for at least an hour.
That’s it. Suzy’s relief is rapidly overwhelmed by her distaste for her own paranoia. Here she was certain that they’d be flying to Cuba to drop off another radical in Havana, like she’d been reading about all summer. A favorite destination. She even heard from a pair of pilots that the government had considered building a fake Havana airport near the Everglades so that planes wouldn’t even have to leave American airspace. A Hollywood Potemkin village for hijackers.
But instead: just standard Texas weather. An hour on the ground in Dallas becomes two. The storm turns out to be so bad, winds so significant, that they clear the runways entirely, rush all planes to hangars. It reminds Suzy of The Wizard of Oz, and she wonders if that one was the first “It was only a dream” in movie history.
From the gate she watches out the windows as a pair of fighter jets taxi right there between the commercial birds. She feels the familiar wistfulness for the claustrophobia of the cockpit. She can make out the red smudge of the pilot’s helmet and finds it to be a shade she might like for herself if she ever races regularly again. After three hours the airline calls it—no one’s getting out until the morning.
Suzy’s put up in a room downtown with the rest of the crew. It’s still light out and not even raining by the time they get to the hotel, and so she walks down by the Book Depository and trudges through mud on the grassy knoll, mud that dries bone-light on her boots. Some of the other girls go out to dinner, but Suzy heads to the bar with another something Mike gave her—a fat one, a weird one, Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel—and orders a rib eye and a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue. And because it’s the same bottle the cowboy at the end of the bar is drinking from, he says it’s on him, a gesture Suzy waves off halfheartedly until he insists, and she gives him an overcooked smile and a double thumbs-up.
When she asks the bartender for another, the bartender says the same guy’s got this one, and the following one, too. They’re already paid for. And so Suzy waves and mouths a thank-you again but returns to her book all the same. She moves through her meal slowly so that she’s not left alone with just the drink. When she re-ups again, the man at the end of the bar stands and ticks off the number of seats between them until there’s just one left. He gives her the space of a single stool.
“You’re eating in a hotel and so I’m gonna assume you’re not from here.”
“You assume right.”
“Tupperware sales?”
“Ouch.”
“No, no, wait.…Replacement-cheerleader tryouts for the Cowboys.”
“Thank you for the drinks, seriously, but—”
“Don’t do that. Gimme a clue.”
Suzy throws her shoulders back in mock posture and says “Can I get you anything else?” in an accent with big Texas hair.
“A stew?” he says, puzzled. “You sure don’t remind me of a stew.”
“Because I’m reading a book?”
“Oh boy, you aren’t making this easy.”
“I’m sorry, why don’t I look like a stew?”
“I guess I’ve just never met one out of uniform, is all. It’s like seeing your schoolteacher out on a date or something.”
“Well, voilà,” Suzy says.
He’s tall, with a thick head of close-cropped dark hair, mussed flat by the Stetson that’s resting on the stool beside him. His ears stick out a little and he’s got the nose of a prey bird. His eyes are a blue that seems plugged into a wall, and they’re roofed by a pair of bushy brows. Wranglers and double-pocketed powder-pink shirt and a bolo tie with the regal profile of a Cherokee chief.
“That’s something,” she says, nodding at it.
“This old Dallas wildcatter, this energy man, listed it for real cheap in the Chronicle, over where I’m at, in Houston. Clearing out the estate. Had that hat there and a pair of boots, too. Best I’ve seen. Came over yesterday. Guess how much.”
“How much for what?” she says.
“The boots!”
“Couldn’t guess.”
“Guess.”
“A thousand bucks.”
“A hundred and twenty bucks,” he says, slapping the bar. “Can you believe that?”
“Those there?” Suzy says.
“Nah, not wearing ’em. For my poppy. He took a new job in New York and he’s missing the Texas stuff.”
“Mazel.”
“Pardon?”
“Congrats to your dad,” she says. “And thanks again for this.”
“Don’t mention it. We’re all stuck here together.”
“Didn’t you just drive over, though?”
“You ever driven through east Texas during a storm like this?”
“I have not.”
“Well.”
“I bet it’s not that bad,” Suzy says.
“Oh yeah?”
“I bet I could make the drive.”
He narrows his eyes. “Stuck’s fine with me.”
Reports on the Cowboys-Packers game in Milwaukee have been coming in low on the radio, but it spikes now, awash in a debate over injuries, and Suzy’s barmate leans into the news.
When his attention drifts back, he says, “So you’re a stew and I’m a pilot. Bet you didn’t realize how much we had in common.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Texas National Guard.”
“You fly in the war?”
“Just Texas Guard. Kept it close to home. Over at Ellington.”
“You gonna go commercial?”
He looks puzzled. “Figuring it out. Taking a break, working on a political campaign in Alabama.”
“Politics, too?”
“Not my primary interest.”
“You’d rather be flying.”
“I’d rather be pitching for the Astros.”
“Wow, you’re all over the place.”
“Astros. Convair F-102s. Alabama senate campaigns.”
“State senate?”
“C’mon.”
“The big show?” she says. “That’s a diverse portfolio.”
“Thinking about business school after that.”
“Keep ’em coming…what else?”
“Nah, that’s enough from me. How ’bout one from you?”
“Well, believe it or not, I’m gonna be a pilot, too.”
“They move a lot of the girls into the cockpit?”
“Not as often as they should. I’m in training now.”
“Nothing to it once you’re off the ground.”
“That’s what the boys say.”
She doesn’t even see him order another whiskey, but there it is. He lowers the waterline of his drink with the hand sleight of a pickpocket.
“Say, what’s your favorite stew joke?” he says.
She smiles without her teeth and turns in her seat: “They’re all pretty lame.”
“Wanna know mine?”
“You bought the drinks.…”
“So the stew goes up to the cabin and asks the pilot, ‘Coffee, tea, or me?’” He pauses for effect. “And the pilot goes: ‘Which one’s easiest to make?’”
“I really didn’t think that was gonna be the one,” Suzy says.
“Lame, huh?”
“That’s the joke even the shrews at stew school feel okay giggling at.”
“Yeah, I like it.”
“How ’bout this one,” Suzy says. “Which do you prefer, sir? TWA coffee or TWA tea?”
“I’ve never flown TWA.”
“Ah, it wouldn’t make sense, then,” she says, chewing a cube so it squeaks.
The man mouths the riddle to the ice in his tumbler. And then he shifts in his seat and smiles, like it’s all gone to plan, like it’s working out just right for him.
“Ha!” he says. “I hadn’t heard that one. T-W-A-T, I like that.…I prefer…TWA tea.”
She sizes him up all over again.
“You don’t look much like a horses-and-lassos cowboy.”
“You’re picking up on my time back east.” He flashes a gold university class ring, and in the instant she thinks she recognizes the familiar Hebrew letters of the Yale crest. But his hands tuck back beneath his elbows on the bar before she can see for sure. “Odessa, Midland, Houston, before that. Poppy worked in oil. I went away and now I’m back. I’ve gotta say, I missed the clothes.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but when you’re dressed up like it, you kinda have the Jon Voight thing going on, when he steps off the bus in Times Square.”
“Still haven’t seen it,” he says. “But I know the Nilsson tune.”
Suzy smiles and finishes her drink and drops it loudly on the bar. She scrapes the last of her zucchini around with a fork and presses her plate in the bartender’s direction.
“Can I get you another drink or something?” the cowboy says.
Suzy’s got an early call time and she’s the kind of lit that’s one drink too many for a good night’s sleep and one drink short of a sure hangover. She’s making a hard break of the twenty-four-hour rule either way. And here, after thirty minutes with this traveler—this thing before her that’s hogging her field of vision, this shape that the camera in her mind has irised in on, this creature with whom she’s collided and intertwined and that she’s come to regard as the sole protagonist of her recent memory—Suzy’s growing susceptible to the idea that he might very well be the only man left in the whole world.
“I’m good,” she says, lifting herself and subtly falling forward toward him. “But listen: you get something else for yourself and put it on my bill. To pay you back. The airline’s got it anyway, you know?”
He looks a little hurt, since things seemed to be going so well—but he has a nice mouth. And the longer he keeps that ring tucked under his arms, the greater Suzy’s conviction grows to see it again.
“Room 325.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Suzy slides what’s left of the last ice cube into her mouth and cracks it in half. She steps closer and wraps her painted nails around his bolo tie. For whatever reason, that’s the moment she remembers that there’s freight glowing undelivered in her carry-on, and she feels a fuzzy heat beneath her skin.
“You understand what I’m saying? Room 325, ’kay?”
Suzy’s over for a Sunday dinner and the energy’s high. Mike had stayed on Reverend Jones. Went back to the downtown temple. Found out enough to know there was something worth doing. But he couldn’t pursue it with the present revenue stream. He needed someone else’s advance. He’d called an editor at Rolling Stone, a guy who used to throw Mike lines when he was living and writing in New York. Mike was dismayed to find that the magazine already had someone on Jones, but just this afternoon he received a call—the original writer had begged off, hadn’t been able to get anywhere accesswise. Did Mike think he could do better? They gave him three months.
It’s a good assignment. It’s important and it’s money. But Suzy knows it kills his new magazine, maybe for good.
After eating, while Mike and Grace do the dishes, Suzy picks up a recent Saturda
y Review, sees a new piece by Susan Sontag teased on the cover, flips to the opening spread: “To be a woman is to be an actress,” it says. “Being feminine is a kind of theater, with its appropriate costumes, décor, lighting, and stylized gestures.” It’s not just the stews, then, Suzy is reminded, who are forced to play for the audience. It’s a piece of writing that reminds her of the sort of stuff she read every day while studying with Camille. Those exercises, that routine, already feel so distant. Trapped behind a curtain, almost belonging to a different life.
It’s still early, and so Suzy, Grace, and Mike hop in the car and head up to Hollywood together to a special movie thing Mike heard about. Last Tango in Paris is showing, fresh off the US premiere at the New York Film Festival. Traffic’s nonsensically bad and they arrive between screenings. They have an hour to kill, so they park and buy cheeseburgers and walk over to Hollywood High, sit on the concrete barriers out front, on the corner of Sunset and Highland, where teenage skateboarders attempt and fail to grind on the edge of a bench. Suzy’s been holding her breath for the moment that Grace says she wishes she could just see Cabaret again. But instead Grace pulls a joint out of her pocket and, under the showers of streetlights, convinces both of them to smoke with her.
“Where’d you get that?” Mike asks. And Grace says, “A friend at the beach,” before specifying that she means J.P. Mike squints searchingly as he inhales, and Grace ribs him for having fun only when a high-snob Italian film is on deck.
It’s a shitty thing for Grace to do, Suzy thinks—he’s damned if he does or doesn’t.
A teenager who’s a head shorter than his friends, curly brown hair and tube socks pulled up to his knees, rolls over and asks if he can have some. Grace laughs and Mike smiles shiftily, but Suzy says, “If you land that”—meaning the trick they’ve all been failing again and again—“then you can keep the rest.” The boy smiles and turns back to the starting line. “But if you miss,” Suzy says, “I get to keep your board.” The boy stops and turns back over his shoulder, pausing to weigh his options, and then he shakes his head, No thanks. He waits to see if she’ll change her mind, but all she says is, “Bitchin’ board.” And so he returns to his friends and waits till Suzy and Grace and Mike get up and leave before he tries the trick again. Suzy resists the urge to turn back and watch, but listens and smiles at the sound of a clean landing.