Up in the Air

by Walter Kirn

  “Hung up at DIA. The Denver airport.”

  “Someone saw you in Salt Lake on Friday. You’re sure you’re not here?”

  It’s a funny question, actually. More than once I’ve landed in a city, spent a couple of hours there, flown off, and forgotten the visit just a few days later. Salt Lake I tend to remember, though. That temple. The byzantine liquor laws and spry old men.

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “It was Wendy Jance who spotted you. Downtown. At that restaurant you like that serves the liver.”

  “How is she these days?”

  “Like you care. Don’t play that game. She’s the same as she was when you stopped calling her: bright, attractive, a little lost, and furious.”

  I suppose that it’s time I explain about the women.

  There are a lot of them. I credit my looks. This sounds awful, but I’m a handsome man, conventionally proportioned, but with flair. Old tailors love me. They tell me I remind them of men from forty years ago, slim but sturdy, on the small side but broad, with a long inseam. In most ways I have the same body as my father, who never consciously exercised or dieted and yet retained a thoughtless fitness even into his grim, suspicous old age. The farmwives on his gas route were all admirers, waylaying him with cookies and iced drinks while I waited, shy and watchful, in the truck, impressed even then by his patient rural gallantry. At his funeral, freed by the fact that he’d died single, the ladies wept abundantly and frankly, their tears erasing years from their old faces. My mother cried too, but mostly to keep up, I think. Public opinion had it that she’d wronged him. She’d remarried. He hadn’t. She’d prospered. He’d died in debt. Only physically had my father come out ahead. While she’d blurred away and lost all definition, becoming one of those women who need makeup not to highlight their features but to create them, he’d kept his hair and muscles and blue-green eyes right through the funeral director’s final touch-ups.

  My genes only partly account for all the women, though. Sheer availability matters too. I’m out there among them, mixing, every day, eating a spinach salad one table over, changing my return date in the same ticket line. Take Wendy. I met her at the registration desk of the Fort Worth Homestead Suites. The hotel computer had eaten her reservation, an American Legion convention was in town, and she was facing a night without a room when I stepped up with my Premier-Ultra Guest Card. The clerk reversed herself; Wendy got her key. It was only fair that she join me for fillet at the in-house Conestoga Grill, where my mastery of the modest wine list wowed her. Soon, we were talking shop. Her shop: cosmetics. The animal-testing furor. The Asian market. “Organic” versus “natural.” I knew the business. That she lived two doors down from my sister never came up—not until afterwards, while watching pay-per-view, wrapped in a humid polyester sheet, our clothes and papers strewn across the room like wreckage from a trailer-park tornado. Our parting posture, unconsciously devised while watching Tom Cruise destroy a bio-terror ring, was that of two jaded orgiasts (focus word) putting one over on the Bible Belters.

  A few days later Kara called my mobile and said that friend of hers had seen my picture in a family photo album and asked if I ever came to Utah. Subtle. Playing along, I flew to Utah twice that month, saw Wendy both times, then decided to back off when she thrust at me a sheaf of poems about her struggles with her Mormon faith.

  She hadn’t said she was a member. It broke the deal. These people believe that in the life to come they’ll rule their own stars and planets as God rules ours. Lori, after she left me, became one, too, switching from short skirts to full-length dresses and marrying a real estate executive who had her pregnant within a couple of months.

  My fling with Wendy wasn’t typical. Usually, there’s more romance, a slower buildup. I spot someone, or she spots me, across a buffet table or a conference room. Later, we find ourselves on the same flight and exchange a few words while dawdling in the aisle, mentioning to each other where we’ll be staying. At seven, as both of us step from scalding showers, snug inside freshly laundered terry robes, our hair still fragrant with giveaway shampoo, the telephone rings in one of our hotel rooms. A dinner follows where we compare our schedules and learn that we’ll both be in San Jose on Thursday—or that we can be, if we want to be. The next night, from different hotels, we speak again. For me, no sensation is more intoxicating than lying alone in bed, strange room, strange city, talking to someone I barely know who’s also disoriented and on her own. Her voice becomes my chief reality; lacking other landmarks, I cling to it. And she clings to my voice. Each other is all we have. By Thursday, as we park our rented Sables in front of a restaurant that neither of us has eaten at but that both of us have read good things about in Great West’s in-flight magazine, Horizons, a sense of destiny beckons. Until dessert.

  Chance is an erratic matchmaker. Now and then it seats me next to women I wouldn’t dream of approaching on my own. On other occasions it dishes up a Wendy, superficially suitable but with a flaw. And a few times, I fear, it has offered me perfection.

  “When will you be in Seattle?” Kara asks.

  “I get in Wednesday.”

  “Late?”

  “Mid-afternoon. But I might have to go to Arizona instead.”

  “Here are your instructions. Listening? Go straight to the Pike Street Market—it shuts at six—and order twelve pounds of king salmon, alder-smoked. Send it overnight to Mom’s, but make sure you inspect it first. Look for red, firm meat.”

  “I can’t do this over the phone?”

  “You have to see it. Make sure it’s good fish.”

  “By the weekend it won’t be fresh, though.”

  “It’s smoked. It’ll keep. Don’t flake out on me this time. Don’t pull another Santa Fe.”

  She wounds me. Santa Fe was a fluke, and not my fault. Our mother had visited a gallery there during one of her winter Winnebago runs with her current husband, the Lovely Man. (So called because he’s small, he hardly speaks, and he has no discernible personality.) She fell in love with a Zuni bracelet there and described it to Julie, who mentioned it to Kara, who ordered me, on my next trip to New Mexico, to buy the thing as a gift from the whole family on my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday. I did my best, but due to a buildup of errors in the description, the piece my mother ultimately received was Hopi, ill-fitting, overpriced, and, as my mother told the Lovely Man (who then told Kara, proving he’s not so lovely), “positively god-awful.”

  “Unfair,” I say.

  “Well, this is your chance to redeem yourself.”

  “Unfair.”

  “There’s one other thing,” says Kara. “Tammy Jansen, Julie’s maid of honor. She’s in St. Louis now. Her car’s in the shop, so she’s going to have to fly up, except that she can’t afford the fare they quoted. Twelve hundred dollars round-trip! I hate these airlines.”

  “Fine,” I say. “We’ll both chip in six hundred.”

  “I already offered. When she tried to book, though, they told her they’d run out of seats.”

  I know what’s coming. Take a hard line, I tell myself. Don’t budge. You have a policy, you’ve stated it often, and now you will have to repeat it for the record.

  “Maybe you could cash in some miles,” says Kara.

  I love my sister. Unfortunately, she’s ignorant. She doesn’t fly on any regular basis, so she doesn’t know what I’ve been up against out here. For years, Great West has been my boss, my sergeant, dictating where I went and if I went, deciding what I ate and if I ate. My mileage is my one chance to strike back, to snatch satisfaction from humiliation.

  “We’ll need to find another way,” I say.

  “This is ridiculous, Ryan. This is sad.”

  “How’s Mom? Have you talked to her?”

  “Call her this year, will you? She thinks you’ve turned into butter, disappeared.”

  “Those two move around more than I do.”

  “Be honest: Were you in Salt Lake last week?” she says. “Maybe you have a
girl here. I’m concerned. What if you’re leading some shameful double life? What if you’re in trouble and need help? You’re awfully isolated, the way you live.”

  “Isolated? I’m surrounded,” I say.

  “We’re getting off track now.”

  “You started this whole subject.”

  “Let’s leave it that Kara’s worried. Now let’s rewind. Tammy needs to get here from Missouri.”

  Solving the problem isn’t my sister’s goal. She rejects any number of reasonable proposals—an Amtrak ticket (“Tammy throws up on trains”); a rental car (“The long drive will exhaust her”)—and insists on testing my resistance to giving something away that cost me nothing—or so it seems to her. She calls my mileage rule “this stupid glitch of yours,” and though I’m screaming inside, I don’t explain myself. The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible. Sally will not wear synthetics. That’s who she is. Billy won’t touch eggs. That’s Billy for you. To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.

  The conversation ends here: “My miles are mine.”

  I put down the phone. I have a plane to catch.

  three

  i know of no pleasure more reliable than consuming a great American brand against the backdrop featured in its advertising. Driving a Ford pickup down brown dirt roads. Swigging a Coke on the beach in Malibu. Flying Great West over central Colorado. It’s a feeling of restfulness and order akin, I suspect, to how the ancient Egyptians felt watching the planets line up above the Pyramids. You’re in the right place, you’re running with the right forces, and if the wind should howl tomorrow, let it.

  Below me, through the milky oval window, I can see a pair of alpine lakes glowing an unnatural chemical blue, the color of pools inside nuclear reactors. Mountains topped by radio towers rise to the south and west. That’s Aspen there, the runs cut like bowling alleys between the pines, the metal roofs of the lodges and second homes sending up Morse code glints of morning sunlight. It’s a good day in Airworld. I turn on my tape recorder and enjoy a few minutes of Verbal Edge through headphones.

  We’re flying at half capacity, if that—Desert Air’s discounts have been poaching passengers. It’s more than a price war, it’s opera, this duel. Young Soren Morse, with his B-school line of blarney, against Major Buck Garrett, Korea flying ace. The marketer versus the aviator. Sad. Sad because Garrett, the rugged national treasure, doesn’t have a prayer. He does his own TV spots to save money and comes off as a crank. Worse, he refuses to institute a bonus program. Garrett believes that cheap tickets sell themselves, and so they do, for a certain kind of customer—retirees who fly once a year, if that.

  Standing on her seat a few rows up, a toddler plays peekaboo with me. The secret involvements children have with strangers behind their parents’ backs. I wink, she ducks. “Recognizance: a bond or obligation entered into before a court of law.” I study the backs of other passengers’ heads. A Dairy Queen spiral of frosty, sprayed gray hair, pinned with a platinum snake. A polished bald spot dented in the center and freckled in the dent.

  It’s the people I’ll never meet who most intrigue me.

  “Seditious: given to promoting revolt.”

  I smile to myself. It all connects up here. Across the aisle from me a famous businessman, a securities analyst with his own TV show and a foundation for troubled urban youth, has fallen asleep with a Sprite in his right hand and the beam from the overhead reading light shining into his slack and gaping mouth. The gold in there is amazing, a savage image that I feel strangely privileged to behold. The flight attendant peeks, too—we share a smirk. That mouth moves markets, and look at it: an ore field!

  Celebrities always seem slightly lost on planes. Five years ago, I found myself surrounded by a rock band I’d worshiped as a kid. Two of them sat alone in their own rows and two had girls with them. Their trademark hairstyles—tortured, spiky crests of dull black thatch—looked overdone in such a neutral setting. The drummer, an alleged hotel-room smasher who’d supposedly had his blood replaced at an exclusive clinic in Geneva, thumbed a handheld video game. The singer, the star, sat still and stared ahead as though he’d lost power and was waiting for repairs. His fame seemed to call for a class beyond first, and I couldn’t help but think less of him, somehow, for sharing a cabin with the likes of me.

  The professional athletes stick out most of all. The moment they were scouted in their teens everything stopped for them. Just stay well and eat. They’re served special meals, fat steaks with huge chef’s salads, and if they want more salt they hail a trainer, who tells a flight attendant, who hops to it. The players discuss their injuries, their cars, their investments in nightclubs and auto dealerships. It’s a sleepy existence, from what I can see, devoted to conserving energy. Parents push sheepish kids to shake their hands and the athletes oblige with a minimum of effort, sometimes without even turning their massive heads. Such inertia, such stillness. I envy it.

  This is the place to see America, not down there, where the show is almost over. After college, I crossed the country with a girlfriend, loading a Subaru wagon with beer and sleeping bags and flipping coins to pick that day’s state highway. The girl was sheltered, the daughter of two professors who’d consulted with campus colleagues on her upbringing. No TV. A multilingual reading list. She hungered for mini-golf, for roadside farm stands, for wicked stares from old-timers in greasy spoons. She read On the Road as we drove, declaimed the thing. I knew I was being used—her native guide—and that she’d drop me once the trip looped back to her parents’ cottage on Nantucket, but I wanted to show her something she hadn’t seen.

  I failed. Nothing there. That America was finished. Too many movies had turned the deserts to sets. The all-night coffee shops served Egg Beaters. And everywhere, from dustiest Nebraska to swampiest Louisiana, folks were expecting us, the road-trip pilgrims. They sold us Route 66 T-shirts, and they took credit cards. The hitchhikers didn’t tell stories, they just slept, and the gas stations were self-service, no toothless grease monkeys. In Kansas, my girlfriend threw away the book at a truckstop Dunkin’ Donuts stand and called her father for a ticket home. She’s a Penn State sociologist now, raising her kids the same way she was raised, and I doubt that she’s thought twice in fifteen years about our hoboing. No reason to. The real America had left the ground and we’d spent the summer circling a ruin. Not even that. An imitation ruin.

  The TV stock-picker wakes and blows his nose, then inspects the airline hand towel for lost gold. I take off my earphones and open the AirMall catalogue tucked in my seatback to browse for wedding presents. AirMall guarantees next-day delivery on items ordered in-flight, via airphone, and features offbeat products not found in stores: silver space pens whose ink flows upside down, alarm clocks that beam the time onto the ceiling, portable inversion boards for back pain. Sometimes I fall for these gimmicky wonder items, sending them ahead to my hotel so I’ll have something waiting with my name on it. I have a weakness for white-noise machines that simulate waterfalls and breaking surf. Lately, I can’t sleep without these gadgets. The one I own now is tuned to “summer cloudburst” and I can’t wait to turn it on tonight.

  I narrow my choices to a robot lawn mower that tracks a grid of buried wires (dyslexic Julie will misread the instructions and send the thing careening across the street) and the safer selection, a six-piece luggage “system” fashioned from heavy nylon with Kevlar inserts. It’s not a set I’d ever buy for myself—a light packer, I prefer leather, for its warmth, and because the patterns of scuffs and scratches provide a fossil record of my travels—but for Julie and Keith of the annual jaunt to Florida and the Christmas coach tour of the Holy Land that my mother and the Lovely Man gave them in lieu of a secular honeymoon, these bags should be the ticket. Pockets galore for Julie’s personal pharmacy, stain-resistant if she vomits on them.


  The girl is past delicate. She frightens me.

  Though Kara won’t forgive me if I go through with it, I owe Keith a briefing this week, the whole case history, starting with the bogus model search when Julie was fifteen. Like the other local girls caught up in the fraud, she stopped eating. She ran. She gorged on laxatives. When the promoters vanished with her entry fee, she and a few of the other dupes kept dieting. They started shoplifting, formed a little crime club. The school called in social workers from St. Paul. There was a drug bust, a suicide attempt. Eventually, something turned the girls around, though. They filled out. They got educations. They learned some sense.

  Except for my kid sister. So much grief. The teenage marriage. The teenage divorce. The year in massage school. The food fads and the pills. The racist second husband who went to Sandstone for forging savings bonds on a color copier. And only lately, in the last two years, a kind of peace for Julie, a new purpose, rehabilitating injured animals on a Humane Society rescue farm. She even has a degree now—Licensed Vet Tech—and though she’s still thin, her eyes go where she points them, which I feel is progress.

  Now this wedding. This Keith. I give her two years before she’s in a hospital.

  “Excuse me.”

  The stock expert looks.

  “One question, sir. I know who you are and I know I shouldn’t ask this—”

  “Be my guest. I’m used to it by now.”

  “If you were to buy a single issue tomorrow—a blue chip, as a gift, for the long term, for someone who can’t really handle her own affairs—what would it be?”

  “The recipient’s a minor?”

  “Basically. Actually, she’s thirty-one.”

  “But flaky?”

  “At a fairly high level. Yes.”

  “Female, I’m guessing?”

  “Extremely female.”

  “Right.” The expert swabs his tongue across his gold mine. He’s thinking, he’s taking me seriously. Bless him. There’s grace in Airworld. I meet it all the time.