by Amy Ephron
My ex-husband still thinks it’s his job to calm me down if I’m hysterical but oddly I was very calm. But Sasha repeated his opinion that the man was a crazy person and said with some confidence, “Don’t worry, the airlines are very good at handling things like this. They’re very well trained.”
I went back to my seat and watched as the pilot and copilot took the man off the plane. A few moments later, the pilot reentered the plane and the stewardess came back to my seat and knelt next to me. “The pilot would like to see you, is that okay?”
“Of course,” I answered. I followed her very discreetly as she led me into the cockpit and closed the door behind us. Let me explain, this was before 9/11, so it didn’t seem strange that he wanted to see me in the privacy of the cockpit.
I told him my story. He listened to everything I had to say. But I wasn’t prepared for what he said to me. “I need you to confront him,” he said. “Would that be okay?”
I remember being a little flip. “Gee, that wouldn’t be my favorite thing to do,” I said. “Are you sure that’s necessary?”
“Yes, I feel it is,” the pilot said.
Let me say this about pilots—it’s not the uniform, or the fact that they know how to fly the plane, but that they feel confident flying a plane with passengers whose lives are in their hands and if they ask you to do something, you just have to figure, they’re the Captain of the Ship and you’re supposed to follow their instructions. He was emphatic when he repeated, “I need you to confront him.”
“Okay,” I said a little reluctantly. The pilot led me out of the cockpit and back into the walkway where I’d had the initial encounter. His copilot and one steward were standing with the gentleman I’d boarded with in the walkway at the entrance to the plane.
Almost before I stepped out of the plane, the man began to shout, “I have never seen this woman before. She is crazy.”
I thought that was sort of strange since I hadn’t said anything yet. I interrupted him. I was speaking softly but firmly and calmly because I was frightened that this would escalate and the other passengers would hear. “What do you mean? We talked to each other right here, while we were boarding the plane.”
“She is a crazy person.” We were talking on top of each other. “I have never seen her before—”
“But when I boarded the plane, you spoke to me, you—” I was sort of frightened to confront him.
The pilot cut me off and said very sternly, “Come with me.”
I thought I was in trouble as he quickly led me out of the walkway back into the airport to the counter at the gate. I expected to be taken into custody any minute and labeled a crazy person.
Before I could say anything, the pilot said, “It’s okay. We know you’re telling the truth. He’s told us four different stories and none of them make sense. We know that you’re telling us the truth.”
This next bit was even odder. “I have to ask you something, though,” he said. “Do you feel safe flying to Los Angeles with this man on the plane?”
Gee, I sort of felt that shouldn’t be my decision and knowing me, I probably said that. I think I did say, “Gee, I’m not sure that should be my decision.” But then I answered him more seriously. “Not really. I don’t really feel safe with him on the plane. But frankly, I’m also a little concerned about the luggage that he might have on the plane.”
“I understand,” he said, in that sort of military way that people like him say things like that, so you can’t quite tell what’s going on behind their eyes. “Can I ask you to please get back on the plane while we deal with this?”
I’m not sure why but, like I said, there’s that Captain of the Ship thing, and I just followed him back down the walkway and reboarded the plane. I was surprised to see that they’d also asked the man who’d made the threat to reboard the plane as well, and there he was, sitting back in seat 5D. He gave me a really strange smile when I walked past him. I just kept on walking and took my seat again towards the back of the plane.
At no time during all of this did anyone make an announcement, no statement about a delay or “engine trouble” or crowded airways. But, like I said, it was SFO and since there was usually only one runway open, even though we’d now been at the gate fully boarded for an hour and a half, nobody thought it was strange and nobody seemed to have noticed that a couple of us had been on and off the plane a couple of times in the interim. Like I said, 9/11 hadn’t happened yet and nobody was paranoid or on high alert.
The stewardess walked back to my seat a few minutes later and knelt on the floor next to me. She whispered, “We’re doing a background check on him, now. The Federal Marshalls will be here shortly.”
After what seemed like a really long time, but was probably not more than 15 minutes, two Federal Marshalls boarded the plane. They escorted him off. He didn’t make a fuss, and it was almost as if nobody noticed.
I heard the cargo door being opened and peered out the window as they removed two suitcases from the plane.
The stewardess walked back to my seat and knelt again in the aisle. She whispered, “His background check didn’t match,” she said, “and we wanted to thank you. We also wanted to let you know that we’ve taken his luggage off the plane. But the pilot wanted me to ask you one more time if you felt safe on this plane or if you’d like to take another one.”
“Are you staying on the plane?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Okay, I guess it’s fine. Thanks.” I had a moment when I wondered if I should get off the plane but then, shouldn’t all the other passengers get off the plane, too? We were cleared for takeoff and the engines were on.
After we were in the air, the pilot made an announcement, the gist of which was, “I want to apologize for the delay. We had an ‘unruly’ passenger on board and in the interest of everyone’s safety, we felt it was best to remove him from the plane. All beverages, alcoholic and otherwise, will be complimentary on this flight.”
It was three in the afternoon. I don’t drink during the day (unless I’m in France and the lunch we’ve ordered is “screaming” for a glass of rosé), but I had a double shot of Absolut the moment the beverage cart hit my seat, took a deep breath, and was enormously relieved when, an hour later, we landed safely in Los Angeles.
Ten
Why I Quit Being Psychic
“Hi, I’m Amy and I’m psychic.”
Everyone else in the room responds in unison, “Hi, Amy.”
At least that’s what happens in my fantasy. But there is no organization for “recovering psychics” and I don’t know if I would want to join it if there were. Partly because there would be all those other psychics in the room. And, like I said, I’m trying to quit.
I don’t know when I first knew that I was psychic. I think I was born that way. I remember things that happened when I was a child. At first it didn’t seem like it was a problem—but things like that never do.
Being psychic isn’t like riding a bike—it’s something that you have to keep up, that you have to practice—it’s something that you have to let in. And like any addiction, once you open the floodgates, it’s difficult to give it up.
But everyone has a moment when they hit bottom, where it’s all spinning out of control and you don’t think you’re going to be able to get it to stop and it feels scary. I remember when it happened to me.
My first husband, Sasha, and I were playing bridge with T-Bone Burnett and some girl he was dating whose name I can’t remember. I was coming off a big run—I’d just accurately predicted a burglary, an earthquake, and somehow psychically known that my old boyfriend’s father had passed away the day before in New Jersey (hadn’t spoken to him for years and had no idea his father was even ill)—and I guess I was talking about it because it had
been a sort of over-the-top week, psychically speaking. And T-Bone, who’s brilliant and funny, has perfect politics, is unbelievably talented, and is “born again”—but he’s a musician and he’s from Texas so that’s to be expected and he was drinking and smoking but apparently abstaining from sex without marriage, although I wasn’t sure I ever quite believed that since he and the girl he was dating were actually living together—professed that he didn’t believe in psychic phenomena, at all.
I looked across the table at Sasha who was my bridge partner and smiled, and he gave me a small smile back. I don’t know if I said it out loud or not, but I looked at T-Bone and implicit in the look was “Watch this.”
I turned my attention to a key that was upright in a lock on the ledge of the window next to the table in the breakfast room where we were sitting and I assume not turned to the lock position. I stared at it for a moment—and the key flew straight up into the air out of the lock on the window ledge and landed on the bridge table. It was a little scary, but I have to admit I experienced a certain “rush” when it happened. Nobody said a word. After a somewhat awkward silence, T-Bone placed the key on the ledge of the window, although not back in the lock and I very shyly said, “Whose deal is it?” And we resumed playing cards.
I’d never done anything like it before and it was seductive and frightening (in the way that something seductive can be frightening). I thought about delving deeper. I had a fantasy that I could go to psychic school, not that I was certain such a thing existed, but I imagined I could apprentice myself to a real psychic and actually learn how to do it. But I also felt that if I did, there might be no turning back.
The next day I was driving on the freeway and a midnight-blue Mercedes pulled up next to me. The driver turned and looked at me. He was terribly attractive, Russian or Nordic, with dark-blond hair, high cheekbones, and piercing eyes. And he stared at me intently, and even though we were both driving on the freeway at close to 80 miles an hour, he didn’t seem to watch the road. And then he turned his eyes back to the road and sped up as if beckoning me to follow him. As he pulled ahead of me, I saw that his Vanity License Plate read PSYCHIC1. I thought about following him but realized I had no idea where he was going or if anyone would ever see me again. It scared me. And that was when I quit.
I’ve been straight now for almost 16 years. Okay, I admit it, I’ve had a couple of slips—it wasn’t my fault. I know, people always say that, but it wasn’t. I woke up really early one morning and had a premonition that a stock my children owned was going to drop 30 points that day, after it had had a 700% increase over the last three years. I have no idea what prompted that thought, which I “knew” to be a certainty, but I called the broker at 5 A.M. Pacific Standard Time and, almost robotically, asked him to sell. By ten that morning, the stock had dropped from 57 to 23. He did call me back that afternoon and ask if I’d by chance spoken to anyone at the company since it was truly odd. I hadn’t. People who don’t believe in psychic phenomena always think there’s a logical explanation for an occurrence. But I can’t quite believe that my selling the small amount of stock my children owned had prompted a “run on the stock.” It was a psychic moment and it paid for a couple of years of tuition. On that one, I have no regrets. A few years later, I sensed a dear friend was thinking about taking her own life. I got in the car and drove to San Francisco and showed up on her doorstep. She credits me with saving her life. That Christmas, she gave me a diamond necklace (which I never wear since we no longer speak), but I have no regrets on that one either. The third one, I don’t want to talk about. Everyone has revenge fantasies but this was a little extreme and didn’t solve the initial problem to begin with, but stuff like that never does. Like I said, I don’t want to talk about it.
Alan, my present husband, doesn’t believe in psychic phenomena, or coincidence, for that matter (but he’s a lawyer), so he doesn’t think I had anything to do with the thing that happened to the terrible people who lived next door—but I disagree and I don’t want to encourage anyone to go down a dangerous path, as seductive as it is. Alan’s disbelief is part of what helps me stay straight—he’s whatever the opposite of an enabler would be, and I’m blessed to have him in my life. And I have to admit, I’m much happier since I quit—I’m less frightened, less anxious, less certain of my own omnipotence (which is always a good thing). The first step to sobriety is recognizing that you have a problem. I’m psychic and all I can do is take it one day at a time.
Eleven
Post-Modern Life
I have a recurring fantasy (or else it’s a fear), something has happened to my husband, we’re in the hospital—that is, he’s in the hospital, not conscious, and I’m standing over his hospital bed trying to determine what state I think he’s in. His ex-wife bursts through the door of the hospital room and it’s almost like a white wind or the absence of any air in the room. She is waving a piece of paper. It turns out my husband has redone all his paperwork except for one: his medical power of attorney. (I have a feeling there might have been a bad movie made that had this plot. Or that it’s a good idea for a movie. I’m not sure which one.)
But in this recurring fantasy (or fear) a number of variations occur: Either she wants to pull the plug and I don’t or I want to pull the plug and she doesn’t. (I’m right in both cases, by the way.) The doctor comes in and says, “Of course, Mrs. Rader, whatever you want to do”—and he’s talking to her.
As with most irrational fears, it’s rooted in a deep reality.
In my own defense, I will say that I met my present husband two years after he had separated from his first wife (but also two years before they were actually divorced). I would not say, by any means, that their divorce was amicable or that the process of reaching a divorce settlement was civil. It went on forever and at one point they began to argue about their frequent-flier miles. I get it. My best friend and I once helped a woman I know move out of the fancy East Side triplex that she shared with her first husband before they got divorced. At one point, late in the day, they began to fight over a box of Ritz crackers. In this case, I have to take the woman’s side—he didn’t even like Ritz crackers, which was her point. But the real point is, a Ritz cracker isn’t a Ritz cracker—it’s all those cocktail parties that you threw and the dreams that you had about what would be in the future. And frequent-flier miles aren’t really frequent-flier miles—they’re about the trips you will take with the children in the future, the trips he might take with me, the trips you took (or the things you purchased) together that racked up the frequent-flier miles to begin with. It’s still a pretty silly thing to fight about, especially if you’re both paying lawyers to have the argument for you. Did I mention that both my husband and his ex-wife are lawyers? (I think they made a bad movie about this once, too.) Neither one of them, however, is a divorce lawyer.
In my husband’s first wife’s defense, I will say that I am also divorced and even though I was the one who asked my husband to leave and we remained friends, there were a couple of years there where I was pretty mad at him. Almost madder at him than I was when I was married to him. So, I get it. Sort of.
My husband and his first wife speak now, occasionally. I have remained friends with my first husband and we speak often, although the regularity with which he does not make child-support payments is sometimes infuriating. But in the ensuing years, we have become a post-modern family.
•••
If you ask my oldest daughter, Maia
, how many siblings she has, she says, “Five—no, six,” then counts on her fingers and says again, “Five—no, six.” The correct answer is six. I can’t tell which one she’s forgetting, but she has a sister and a brother, an older stepsister and stepbrother on my husband’s side, and one stepsister and one half-sister on her father’s side. The half-sister is four years old and, I understand, on her way to me this summer (but don’t tell my husband because I haven’t figured out how to break this to him yet). In totally aberrant moments, Alan and I sometimes discuss inviting everyone for Thanksgiving dinner. If you think you can take all 14 of us (or is it 13—I don’t know who I’m adding or subtracting here), and turn us into one happy albeit dysfunctional family, you’re probably kidding yourself.
•••
My husband has a fantasy that is somewhat like a post-modern version of a movie that was made starring Jimmy Stewart called Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart rents a house in Maine, and he and his wife invite all their children and grandchildren to come and stay with them for the summer. The house is a disaster, the heat doesn’t work, the stove doesn’t work, the pipes break, and, of course, nobody gets along. At the end of the movie, even though the summer has been pretty much a disaster (except for a few poignant moments at the end), Mr. Hobbs is back in his office in New York, making arrangements to do it again.
We tried this once. We rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard. We had a fantasy—afternoons on the beach, fishing in the morning, long lazy walks, lying on the meadowlike lawn watching the rabbits run by, grilled lobsters, a jigsaw puzzle going at all times, dinners with friends on the island. It rained steadily seven of the nine days we were there.
The first day was spent in the emergency room—my son, Ethan, had dropped an anchor on his toe, out at sea, at a camp on the historic sailing ship the Shenandoah. He spent the rest of the vacation lying on the couch in the living room. The house we’d rented was a little small. (My apologies to Alexandra Styron for any damage we may have inadvertently done to her beautiful house because there were too many of us in it. In fact, now that I think about it, except for the time I ran into her on a street corner, she’s never spoken to me again.)