Fortunately, Rand is different. He shrugs things off, and he’s perfectly happy smiling brightly at unpleasantness. He forgives and loves and rarely worries. He’s almost reckless in his desire to not stress the details in his personal life. That said, when it comes to work, he is almost as crazy as I. We all have our weaknesses. His is a software startup.
I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve seen him actually lose it. It tends to be when freaking out is entirely called for, but I am unable to muster the reserves of energy required to do it because after three decades of being entirely unhinged I need a nap. The first time it happened was the year my mother came over for Easter dinner, and I was exhausted from having spent the day cleaning and cooking and having imaginary preemptive fights with my family. By the time Mom opened up her purse and said, “You will not believe what I found,” and then pulled out a perfectly spherical World War I–era grenade, which she was holding up by the pin, I could only stare blankly at it.
“Huh,” I said.
This was one of the rare moments when Rand took over the noble role of screaming at my mother.
“IOLANDA WHAT THE HELL! PUT THAT DOWN!”
“What? It’s just a grenade. It doesn’t work anymore,” she said assuredly. She held it upside down to reveal a hole in the bottom, presumably where the explosives went, and to her credit, they did appear to be gone. After all, Mom’s not completely irresponsible. If she brings a grenade into your home, it probably won’t be live.
“Oh, it doesn’t work,” I repeated, calmly.
“You don’t know that. NONE OF US KNOW THAT,” Rand shouted, which was a fair point. I started dicing some shallots for a salad.
“We need to get rid of it,” he said.
Mom’s reaction was, unsurprisingly, not in accordance with this.
“Nooo,” she whined. “Why do we need to throw it out?”
“Because it is a grenade.”
“I’ll keep it then,” she said.
My husband, having learned that the process of fighting with my mother is roughly as effective as screaming at the ocean to be less watery, acquiesced. His compromise: she could keep the grenade, but not in the house. Rand gingerly took it from her, demanded her car keys, and walked cautiously out the front door.
“Don’t throw it out!” Mom called after him.
“I AM PUTTING IT IN THE TRUNK OF YOUR CAR BEFORE ANYONE ELSE GETS HERE,” he yelled back, while taking small, metered steps away from us.
My mother pouted. She had been excited about the grenade because it was visually similar to an Easter egg, she explained, and had decided that it would therefore be a perfect gift on a day when we were celebrating the resurrection of Christ. She thought it was neat and wanted us to have it.
I nodded. It was all rather sweet if you didn’t think about it too much.
Rand came back a few minutes later, short of breath and clutching his heart, a move he learned from me. My mother began to defend her actions. Rand cut her off.
“Iolanda, no. Just… thank you, it’s very sweet… but no. No grenades. I’m sorry,” he said, and then excused himself to go upstairs for a few moments, presumably to weep.
“What wrong with Rand?” Mom asked.
I shrugged.
“He has a weird thing about grenades or something,” I said. And then I put out some hummus and carrot sticks and went to check on dinner.
This is a man who will scream and lose his mind with worry on my behalf when I am too exhausted to do so. Thankfully, the rest of the time, I’ve got it down.
On nights before early morning flights, I’ve seen him set the alarm clock for p.m. instead of a.m. on more than one occasion. When I catch his potentially disastrous error (and I always do, because part of being me requires checking the alarm clock a half dozen times or so before bed) and point it out to him, he just laughs and says something like, “Well, it’s a good thing I have you.”
That’s the thing I never realized before I met him: for the longest time, I was looking for someone to make sense of my life. I never imagined that I would help him make sense of his.
I don’t think this is unique to us. I think the entire planet operates the same way, possibly the entire universe. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. For every straight man, there’s a prankster. For every me, there’s a Rand.
I don’t mean to suggest that there’s one person out there whom we are meant to be with. We live on a rather densely populated planet—there are lots of people with whom you could potentially share your time. But I think that only a select few of them can help put the disparate pieces of your life perfectly into place. And when that happens, the universe sighs happily, because it, too, has achieved a sort of balance.
He taught me to relax. To be less afraid of travel and less afraid of everything, really. When our luggage was stolen in San Francisco during a weekend trip, he picked me up and said, calmly, “I will fix this.” When I lost my job he told me, confidently, that things would be fine. When I accidentally flambéed bananas in a fireball that threatened to burn down the first apartment we ever shared together, he screamed really loudly but then helped me put out the flames.
I feel constantly indebted to him for making my life better. Every now and then, I’m able to return the favor. It’s few and far between, but it happens—as it did on the night when we should have been in Paris.
IT WAS JUNE 2011—that same wonderful summer during which my blog had started to really take off. His company and his speaking engagements continued to grow, and it felt like maybe he and I were starting to figure out what the hell we were doing. It was only fair that the universe push us around a little.
Rand was scheduled to keynote a conference in the city of light, and it would be our very first time there, save for a few exhausted connections made at Charles de Gaulle Airport, which I would easily write off as one of the worst in the world were it not for one saving grace: macarons. Macarons everywhere.
Ours was an afternoon flight, and the day had been sunny and clear and lovely in a way that is unheard of for Seattle at that time of year. June in the Pacific Northwest is often a miserable affair, but we accept it because we know that what follows will be a glorious July, and then the best August in the country.
After the gloom of June has passed, the cloudless, sunlit days reach 75 degrees. Mount Rainier, snow-capped and giant, looms in the south, Puget Sound shimmers blue, and the city is—for a brief window of time—stunningly beautiful. The sun stays out until late, traces of light remaining in the sky until well past 10 p.m. The temperature drops 20 degrees at night, and the next day, it happens all over again. Two whole months of perfect days.
So we’ve learned not to expect too much of June, and we’re okay with that trade-off.
But this day in June was different. It was as though we’d died and gone to Southern California. We waited in the sunshine for our cab to arrive and take us to the airport. Over my arm I’d tossed my raincoat: the forecast for Paris was not promising.
Before any flight, a cluster of butterflies will emerge from some chrysalis hidden in my body and flock to my stomach. I clutched my gut as we rode to the airport. The anxiety had begun.
I am not a nervous flyer. But I am a nervous check-in-and-get-through-security-er. Everything that happens right up until the cabin door closes is enough to panic me: there is so very much that can go wrong. You could get delayed in security, or find yourself in line behind a serial farter, or discover that your mother has left a miniature pickax in her bag.
I know, I know: there is plenty that can go wrong after a flight takes off, but that’s never bothered me all that much. Maybe I realize that if something goes awry at 30,000 feet, there’s nothing I can do about it. Maybe I always think I’m on the verge of dying anyway, so being in a plane isn’t significantly more dangerous than petting a cat (my Auntie Pia swears you can catch bubonic plague from cats). Whatever the reason, I don’t fear flying. Just everything else.<
br />
This day was no different and was made all the worse because we were flying on Air France. There is, I am almost certain, no airline that can make the whole process of getting on board more difficult.
For some reason, we were unable to check in online. This, in the world of literature, is what is known as foreshadowing. And so my husband and I were forced to speak to someone who worked at the ticketing counter at Air France.
We found ourselves, rather shockingly, dealing with an agent who was quite pleasant and helpful. I suspect she no longer works for the airline, because there was no way she was going to make it very far at that company with an attitude like that. She was young, with a bright smile and a low ponytail of thick brown hair. In what I can only assume is a brilliant preemptive measure against customer service complaints, I noticed that she and everyone else behind the counter lacked name tags.
So I will call her June, because that’s what month it was and because there aren’t enough Junes in the world, of either variety.
We waited patiently as June, too, was unable to find our reservation. This wasn’t particularly surprising, as I am fairly certain AF handles all ticketing information through an elaborate system of Post-It notes, but it was rather stressful. I felt my blood pressure climb steadily upward as Rand used his phone to scroll through his email, looking for some clues as to why our reservation had vanished.
Now, let me take a moment here to provide you with a little background on Air France.
It is the worse airline in the world. In order to work there, you do not need to be a self-motivated worker or an independent thinker. You do not need to thrive in stressful, fast-paced environments. Their only criteria for hiring seems to be a thorough and prevailing disgust with humanity, a loose understanding of what planes are, and a deep-rooted disdain for linear time.
All of that being said, I do admire their commitment to hiring sociopaths and xenophobes, because hey, they need to make a living, too. I just wish that fewer of them worked in customer service.
Rand continued to scroll through his email until he stopped with a start. June, on the other side of the counter, was oblivious to us as he whispered, “Oh, god,” under his breath.
“What?” I asked.
Slowly, he turned his phone toward me.
On the small screen was our flight confirmation email, sent by Air France, with all the details of our trip to Paris. We were in the Premium Voyageur cabin, one teeny but nevertheless glorious step up from Economy (which is, on most transatlantic flights, a surprisingly accurate recreation of a nineteenth-century debtor’s prison).
There were our names, our passport information, our seats, and times of departure. Everything looked in order, until I scanned the date. Friday, June 3.
Which would have been totally fine had it not been Saturday, June 4.
“Our flight was yesterday,” Rand whispered, his eyes wide and disbelieving.
I tilted my head toward June, who was unsuccessfully trying to locate our reservation.
“You cannot tell her,” I hissed back. Not my proudest moment, sure, but I can explain my actions thus:
1. I’m not a very good person.
2. As long as June believed that Air France had erred, we still had a chance of getting on that flight. Thus far, it seemed like a good one, too: she’d found evidence of the transaction. Clearly, the tickets had been paid for—there was just no date.
3. I wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t Air France’s fault. They were capable of some pretty exceptional bureaucratic incompetence. I’d flown on the airline and nearly missed connections because they had us arrive at a gate whose door to the main terminal was locked. Imagine an entire plane of people, ripe from an international flight, locked in a hallway for half an hour until someone noticed. Then having to run across the hellscape that is Charles de Gaulle Airport because if we missed our next flight, Air France would not reimburse us because technically we’d landed on time.
4. I’m starting to think my relationship with Air France is like Harry Potter’s with Voldemort. Long ago there was a prophecy that I would ruin them, and they’ve been trying to destroy me ever since.
Okay, fine, it was technically our fault, and given Rand’s penchant for setting his alarm clock wrong, I felt more than marginally responsible for not double-checking the flight details.
I was thoroughly content to keep the truth of our mix-up to ourselves. I mean, some people keep entire secret families on the side. And to my knowledge, neither Rand nor I have those (though how would we know?), so really, this seemed like not that big a deal.
But my husband is, to a fault, unwaveringly honest—just another one of those things about him that brings balance to my life. There was no way he was keeping this to himself, and despite my suggestions to the contrary, he immediately told June what had happened.
“I need to be in Paris by Monday morning,” Rand said. This was one of the few times in my life, besides our interactions with my mother, when I could hear panic in his voice. He was delivering the opening keynote session for a conference of several thousand marketers.
June was clearly new on the job, because she still seemed to have a modicum of affection for her fellow humans. She quickly set about finding Rand another ticket while my husband began to take short, panicked breaths. I gently took his face in my hands.
“It’s gonna be okay,” I said, my voice calm in a way that it never is. I’m nervous when I’m sleeping. But seeing that this time, it was Rand who needed to panic, I suddenly was able to summon it up from somewhere. If he was going to freak out, I could shrug it off. Balance.
“I can’t believe this,” he said, running his hands through his hair.
“It’s gonna be okay. But if you can’t get to Paris, is there someone who can fill in for you?”
Rand squeezed his eyes shut and nodded. “Maybe. Yeah. I have to make a few phone calls.”
“Why don’t you go do that,” I said, smiling. “I’ve got this.”
Who was this calm, reasonable person I had briefly become? And why was she never, ever around during my family get-togethers or reality show finales?
I stayed at the counter as June tapped at her keyboard and squinted at the screen in front of her.
“Two tickets, right?”
“No. At this point, one is fine, too. If possible, in the same cabin that we were in,” I said. I was okay with staying home, if it meant that Rand didn’t have to fly economy. He suffers from a degenerative disc disease, a condition that is, in his case, painful and permanent, so long flights are not kind to him. A few extra inches of legroom make a huge difference.
“Oh,” I added, “and if it’s affordable, that would be awesome.”
June smiled. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I liked her.
As she toiled away at her station, I noticed that another Air France employee had appeared, standing a few feet away, watching us. Her blonde, much-abused hair was pulled tightly away from a face that seemed most comfortable wearing a resolute scowl. She seemed to hold some measure of seniority, presumably achieved by drinking the sacrificial blood of kittens.
“Okay, got two in Premium Voyageur!” June announced brightly. At that moment, the woman who’d been watching us swooped in. She spoke directly into June’s ear, without a glance at me or the screen.
“Do not give her that one.”
June started and turned sharply to look at her, but she’d already retreated back to where she was.
“Um…” I said, which I felt summed up the situation well.
“Okaa-aay,” she said, “apparently I can’t give you that seat.”
“No problem,” I replied, brightly, tapping a reserve of optimism and patience that had remained well hidden for the last thirty or so years. “Let’s try for another one.”
June continued typing away.
“Alright! I found you another one.”
And again, the woman from before swooped in.
“Not t
hat one.”
June’s brow wrinkled.
“Is there a reason that—” she began.
“Do not sell her that seat.”
At this point, I noticed an agent at an adjacent desk peer over to June’s monitor and back at the supervisor. Clearly, the woman’s decrees made no sense to anyone. She was taking a weird pleasure out of making life difficult for June. And for me.
I decided not to give her any satisfaction from seeing me rattled.
“OKAY!” I said, brightly and just a little too loudly. “Let’s give it another shot.”
June found another seat. And once again her supervisor swooped in. We were not allowed that one, either. June began to protest.
“But it’s an unsold seat! Why can’t I—”
“NO,” she snapped. I swear, I saw a small smile play on her lips, as she retreated back to where she had been standing. A peculiar little power play was taking place.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I found I was smiling.
“Fourth time’s the charm, right?” I said. I’d clearly gone insane. It was kind of fun.
June nodded, but she was clearly rattled.
“Um, there’s nothing left in Premium Voyageur. I mean, there is,” she said, lowering her voice and gently inclining her head towards her supervisor, “but she says I can’t sell them to you.”
“Let’s try economy, then. Preferably an aisle.”
More clicking. More waiting. Rand returned, somewhat frazzled. He’d managed to get his friend Will, in London, on the phone. If worst came to worst, could he be in Paris on Monday morning, ready to deliver a presentation that he’d never seen before to a few thousand people?
Yes. Of course.
Knowing that Will could fill in calmed Rand down a bit, but he was still on edge. He didn’t want to make his friend rush off to Paris for his own oversight.
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