"I could use some air myself," I told her.
As we walked through the terminal she asked me, "Have they told you when you're getting out of here?"
"By April, guaranteed," I said.
"Holy moly," she said. "You're joking."
"I am."
"Well," said she, "anything is possible."
Out on the sidewalk I lit her cigarette for her. "Oh goody, a gentleman," she said. Then, holding the lit cigarette away from her, examining it with distaste, the way Stella used to sometimes appraise me in the mornings, she said, "These darn things. I went twenty-two years without. And then I got the call from the state police, saying Ralph had been in the crash. I didn't even make it to the hospital before stopping to buy a pack. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor when they told me the price. I think they were sixty-five cents back when I quit the first time. Darn things."
"They keep my hands occupied," I said. "Otherwise I might strangle myself."
"Now I know you're joking," she said.
I was. But anything is possible.
She'd been to Vermont to visit her daughter and grandchild. Her daughter was married to a high-strung political aide who, while smart, worked "for a Socialist." Her granddaughter was two, she told me, and while otherwise angelic, had "sleep problems." ("Sleep issues, I mean," she corrected herself, having obviously been corrected herself.) The parents thought it best to let the girl "cry it out" so after putting her down in her crib they inserted earplugs and pretended to read magazines downstairs while grinding their teeth between spurts of bickering. From the first night, Granny Munchkin found the little girl's shrieking unendurable, and so planted herself cribside, humming lullabies to her. It didn't work, she told me, but it was something. A psychiatrist might have noted the parallels between this and her longrunning vigil at her husband's bedside, but I am not a psychiatrist. I am a smoker. I noted that it must have been nice to see her daughter.
"Oh of course," she said, shrugging lightly as if to conceal a dinge of sadness. "We go back and forth sometimes, about Ralph. She thinks it's time for us to let him go. I don't think that's up to us. Who am I to say what's hopeless and what's not? Leave it to the angels."
She asked if I had children. "A daughter," I said, shrugging lightly myself. I gave her the skinniest skinny about that: Speck getting married tomorrow, me trying to get there. The single sentence summary to which this letter and maybe my life is one long blazing footnote. The conversation moved on, nostalgically, smokily, to the good old days of air travel—the regulation era, with its red-eye flights and goopy-but-satiating meals and dapperly dressed travelers and (here comes my two cents) svelte and allegedly immoral stewardesses and rear-of-the-air-craft smoking sections—and then the Munchkin said What the heck and slid another cigarette from her pack. After I'd lit it she extended a hand to me and said, "Margaret."
"Bennie," I said, pumping her plump hand. "Margaret? I was married to a Margaret once." Ha ha, me. Always playing the rogue. Cue a jellybowl laugh from Ed McMahon.
"Well, I hope you were good to her," she said, with what looked like a wink but might also have been a stigmatic tic.
Whoops. How to respond to that one? I stared for a moment, blinking, watching a baggage porter gnaw a fingernail while leaning against his empty cart. I thought I was good. Tried to be. Damn we were lonely people, the two of us. The day after our berserk tryst in my apartment I received a telegram from Margaret in Warsaw: MORE, SHE SAYS, MORE. Who could fail to grin wolfishly after opening that one? Later that night I composed a slapdash poem for her about our night together, as seen from the perspective of one of my sacrificial shirt-buttons. To be honest I didn't remember all that much of the evening—my blackouts were never fully black, more like burning charcoal: some parts black, some parts gray, some parts orange and blistering—but I recalled enough fleshy details for the purposes of light verse.
The letter she wrote back was so deliciously smutty (as opposed to my cutesy Donne-ish ditty) that I felt I should be charged by the minute for reading it. And then rereading it, whew. Before I had time to respond I received another letter from her, this one winsome and chatty and more but not exclusively concerned with matters above-the-waist. Much of it was about the nineteenth-century painter whose work she was in Poland studying (Henryk Rodakowski) and how I resembled one of his subjects—minus, that is, his rabbinical beard, pear-shaped physique, bulbous copper nose, and obvious blighted penury. The eyes, she said. Something about those starving-hound eyes. (Woof, I said to the letter.) She'd made a rubbing of Rodakowski's tombstone while in Krakow, and enclosed a copy of it for me—an adolescent gesture, to be sure, like your college girlfriend sending you a rubbing of Jim Morrison's grave from Paris, but then perhaps it was an adolescent affair all around. An end-of-summer-camp romance. Or no, scratch that: rather two middle-aged sadsacks fumbling loosely in the dark, pretending they could start fresh. Pretending that springy bed with the parchment-colored sheets was the backseat of an Oldsmobile parked by the lake, pretending the steamy odor of vodka on my rottening skin was the smell of 75¢j/gallon gasoline or a horny teenaged boy's drugstore cologne.
Forgive me: I've ladled too many memories into your bowl already. But allow me one more spoonful. (Your better alternative is to put me on a plane but I can see that's too much to ask.) I haven't thought about poor Margaret in more than a decade, meaning never sober. And now comes Margaret the Munch-kin, High Commandant of the Margarets Brigade, wanting to ascertain that I was good to her sister-in-Margarethood. Well, define good. I've been trying for years, lady, without success or even noticeable progress, like some pinhead into his third decade of trying to outwit a Rubik's Cube.
We continued our correspondence even after she returned to the states, Margaret and I. If we weren't writing daily, then almost daily. How I loved those letters! With each one she became something new in my mind, transformed and retransformed in my squiffed imagination. When I was feeling shallow & thick-witted, I would read her letters about Rodakowski and her work, as well as her responses to my old poems (which she poignantly tracked down via an out-of-print-book search), marveling at her incisiveness and feeling somehow wiser by my association, by the fact that I had made her shriek those voluptuous arias in my bed and then telegram me their echoes the next day. In my lonesome unloved hours I would read her saucier letters, lowering myself into the hot bath of her affection, blood rushing to the center of my body. In the funhouse of my mind my images of her—scarce and scattered to begin with—grew bent and warped. Who was this woman? Did the trail of freckles between her breasts that I remembered, those caramel droplets of sunlight that I kept following in daydreams, truly belong to her? Or were they some other woman's, or no other woman's? I had only her continuous stream of letters and my dim memories of that night which seemed ever less trustworthy as the weeks passed. Admittedly, I draped her in hopes. Here might be a woman who could save me, I thought, who could rescue me from myself. The old drunk's fantasy. Or maybe: Here was a woman I could love. Raptly, I began envisioning our life together: me writing beside a fire in some log-chinked, Frostian Connecticut farmhouse (she'd written to me about the farmhouse, though the chinked logs were my imagined detail), sipping but not guzzling brandy (my naive ambition was never to quit drinking, only to moderate it), some Anglo-Saxon breed of dog snoring at my feet, big marshmallow snowdrifts visible through an ice-latticed window; her drinking muted blends of tea in another room, studying Rodakowski's fat-nosed portraits until that lush desire—which was primarily what I knew of her, firsthand anyway—overcame her, with the force of a popped champagne cork, at which point she would sashay into my room and straddle my chair and et cetera et cetera until even the fire would be blushing. Rinse and repeat. I cherished the thought, as they say. Maybe being in Poland at the time contributed something to my imaginative fervor: Everyone around me was dreaming big. Everything seemed possible. Moreover, I wasn't me over there, or at least didn't feel the soggy old weight of being me. Perhaps, cour
tesy of Margaret, I could prolong not being me—especially since my Polish visa was set to expire. My letters grew increasingly fictional, in spirit rather than statement; I wanted, desperately, to enact this delusive life I'd cooked up, and needed to sell her on it.
After two and a half months I proposed marriage. By letter, of course. This was after an especially rotten night of drinking during which I'd been roughed up by some students, after Grzegorz abandoned me at a party to which he'd earlier dragged me. I was the only one there over twenty-five and apparently my benign two A.M. flirtation with a sweet little number in counterfeit Levi's irked the boys. I suppose, not without empathy, that they were tired of rich old foreigners trying to bed their women. The Russians had been bad enough; now they had to contend with this tanked American poet, slurring lines from Keats. One of them put me in a full Nelson, hoisting me by my underarms, while another led us out the doorway to the stairs. They hauled me halfway down the stairs before chucking me the rest of the way down. Something—the banister, the vodka, or a combination of both—knocked me unconscious for an hour, maybe two. Suffice it to say that it wasn't a pleasant awakening. We drunks always talk about "hitting bottom" but usually without this much precision. If my soul could have quit my body at that moment, could have stood up and brushed itself off and walked away, leaving that corporeal husk crumpled at the foot of the stairs ... well, unfortunately I didn't know how to pull off that particular magic trick, so the point is moot. Just before dawn I staggered home, chanting enough in every language I knew. As the dawn crept across Krakow I wrote Margaret to ask her to marry me, sealed the envelope, and sucked down some ibuprofen. Then I slept, vampirically, until nightfall.
She called me to respond. This was maybe a week and a half later. I hadn't remembered the odd squeak in her voice; it sounded as if it stemmed from a mechanical issue, as if some glottal hinge was rusty and perhaps she needed to gargle some WD-40. I asked if she had a cold which she denied. "Must be a bad connection," I said. She accepted my proposal ("yes, she says, yes"), as you already know, and we set about planning a wedding. Or rather she did: She knew an "interfaith minister" who performed weddings in her study. I said it sounded peachy. I was nearly forty years old and I'd never called anything in my life peachy before, not even a peach. This was either a very peachy sign, or a decidedly bad omen.
She picked me up at JFK. Thankfully she was holding a sign—MORE, SHE GETS, MORE; very charming, though the trope was beginning to wear—because I didn't recognize her. In my defense she was wearing a different dress and had gotten her hair severely chopped. Also I'd never noticed she was flat-footed. My fiancée was 4F. She wanted to make out in the airport but, as sweetly as I could, I suggested we move along, and not only because airports strike me as woefully inappropriate venues for passion. Her Connecticut farmhouse was indeed a farmhouse, somewhere underneath its vinyl siding, but the farm had disappeared decades ago. Split-level homes from the '70s surrounded it like architectural weeds. There was a lake nearby, as she'd written, covered with a rind of antifreeze-colored duckweed; an open meadow had formerly separated her house from the lake, but now two houses were under construction there, gagging the neighborhood's last breathable space. She had a paddleboat tied up at the lake, she said. The blue one. She suggested I take a spin.
That's mostly what I did, to be honest: spin. I'd head out to the lake in the mornings, sometimes with the newspaper but usually not, and paddle the blue boat out to the middle of the verdigris lake where I would sit drinking for hours. In no time at all the duckweed would reclaim the glossy black trail of my wake and I would drink myself to a floating stillness. Even the day after our wedding—a short, crisply secular exchange of vows witnessed by Margaret's younger sister and her department chair—found me on the lake, rather than on my new bride. To be frank I was having problems in the bedroom; for whatever reason, my body wasn't much interested in being there. Reaching under the sheets inevitably yielded a defeated sigh from Margaret. She'd pull the covers up over her unfreckled breasts and together, in silence, we'd watch the cracks on the ceiling. Their entertainment value was nil. Every night the same rerun.
Sometimes, when I was out on the paddleboat, I'd see kids fishing from a footbridge at one end of the lake, but I never saw them catch anything. I admired their faith. I watched burgers get grilled, lawns get mowed. One time I saw a guy in denim shorts, having exhausted himself yanking the starter cord of a recalcitrant push-mower, pick the damn thing up and heave it down the lawn toward the lake, then kick it for added measure. Not romantically, this reminded me of the night I'd proposed; why, I'd been that mower. When the guy glanced up and saw me staring, he pointed at the machine as if to assign blame. I gave no response. Sometimes, too, I'd spy Margaret, my new wife, at the edge of the lake, leveling the same stare at me as I'd leveled at the mower thug. Sometimes she'd wave. Sometimes I'd wave back. On occasion she'd leave a picnic lunch, cold lemon chicken or something, the knife and fork tied together with ribbon. The ribbon broke my heart. Oh what the fuck had I done this time.
Margaret ended it. Or rather it was Margaret who spoke the ending aloud. I didn't have the guts. "This is silly," she said matter-of-factly one evening. "You don't love me."
"I want to," I said.
"It doesn't work that way," she said. "It's not a matter of willpower."
We were remarkably sanguine about it. That is to say, she was. I was just me. More than anything else she felt foolish, she said. It had just felt so good to connect, she said. The connecting felt so good, so strong. Part of her, she admitted, had felt swindled in these final few days, as if she'd fallen for some swarthy con artist's ruse. Yet she'd decided she wasn't the one who'd been duped—I was. I'd conned myself. Weakly, I argued, but it was all for show. After a while she brewed us some coffee and when she delivered me a mug she was unhappily laughing and saying, "Never in a million years did I think I'd end up in a fly-by-night marriage. My oh my. Well, Lorna"—that was her sister—"had you pegged from the get-go. Said you can't base a marriage on a one-night stand. I told her to loosen up. I said you don't turn away love because it doesn't ring the doorbell wearing a suit and carrying roses. Sometimes it comes, I don't know—in through the window."
"Like a mosquito," I said.
"I hate it when she's right."
"We could try counseling," I offered.
"Oh Bennie," she said. "Shut up."
Cut now to the present, or rather to the nearer past.
"No," I answered the Munchkin. "I wasn't so good to her."
She arched her eyebrows. "There's always tomorrow," she said.
"Oh Jesus, I haven't seen her since—"
"To be good," she said. "There's always tomorrow to be good. Now, here," she went on, rummaging through her fannypack until that handheld slot machine appeared in her hand. "I've got a cot in there someone's going to steal, so you've got to be quick. But take a spin. Go ahead."
Why not? I depressed the fat oval button at the base. Two bars and a cherry. Close but no cigar, or no cigarette to be more accurate. "One more try," I said.
"That's the only way to win," she said.
Rightly, as it turned out. Three sevens! "Jackpot!" I bellowed. Count 'em, baby! I flashed the machine at the Munchkin and did a giddy little shuffle on the sidewalk. The baggage porter paused from molesting his fingernail to watch me for a moment, and had he not swiftly resumed his chewing I might've tried high-fiving him. Some skin for my win, my brutha! Read 'em and weep. There must be thousands of human beings stranded at this airport but at that odd moment I was the only one dancing. Go figure.
"See?" said the Munchkin. "Nice going, buster."
"What do I get?" I asked her.
"'Get'?" she said, and considered it for a moment. "Well, not money, if that's what you're hoping. You get points."
"Oh," I said, deflating. "What do I get with the points?"
She looked at me as if I was an idiot. "Happiness," is what she said, softly prying the machine from my ha
nd.
***
Dear American Airlines, it occurs to me that those whiz-bang handheld slot machines might be a good investment for you. Here's how it would work: Passengers would be handed one of the machines with their boarding pass. At the gate, thirty minutes prior to the scheduled departure, everyone would have to take a spin at the very same time. If everyone hits jackpot simultaneously, a massive cheer goes up and the plane departs on time. If not, they wait one hour and try again. The upside for you is that we passengers would bemoan our bad luck rather than castigate you. Fate would get the blame, not the poor gate attendants who in this scenario will just shrug and smile and bid us better luck next time. Your planes would take off at about their normal rate but the populist heat would be diverted. See? I offer this idea to you gratis though you should feel encouraged to cite me in the press release. It would make my mother so proud to see me in the business pages. In fact, here's my quote: "'Americans love gambling, but their main form of gambling—heading to the airport—has been flagrantly rigged for years,' said Benjamin Ford, a transportation consultant who devised the system for the Texas-based airline. 'The Jackpot Take-Off® from American Airlines is a game of pure chance, and takes the flying game out of corporate hands and delivers it into the hands of the people.'" Tweak as needed, and you're welcome.
Speaking of Texas: I believe that's where I left off with my tale of mother-son adventure, my childhood roadtrip with Sally Paradise. So as they used to say in the western pulps: Meanwhile, back at the ranch. I remember Texas lasting forever—my mother asked me to draw a picture of it, so I drew a straight horizontal line and called it quits—but we made it to New Mexico by the second evening. I don't believe my mother had a clear destination in mind, other than New Mexico, i.e. "the Faraway." We drifted north toward Santa Fe, which was near to where O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch was located, but Miss Willa was jumpy and anxious once we crossed the state line, as if she expected the Faraway to be rapturously self-evident—as if she thought she would recognize one of the abstract landscapes from O'Keeffe's oeuvre and then need only to park the car. Suddenly invalidated, the Texaco roadmap we'd been unfolding and folding since New Orleans sank beneath a pile of candy wrappers and other travel-debris on the floorboards. "We're close, Benjamin," she said. "I can feel it." That evening's sunset was characteristically crimson but insufficiently magnificent for her. "It must be too dry," she said. "The air needs a little moisture for a really fiery sunset. You'll see."
Dear American Airlines Page 11