Flight

T. S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month,” and even though he penned the line while his mind was aground in the wreckage of WWI, I know that had he been sitting in row 9 alongside “Carl” and me on a Southwest flight from Chicago to Seattle last April, he would have raised a knowing eyebrow and nodded his assent when I uttered those very words to him.

I had the misfortune to be in Group C, so I boarded the plane with a simple plan: grab a window seat close to the front, better than suffering the middle position for 4.5 hours.  On the aisle of row 9 was a large man. When I saw him I quickly calculated that only a small woman would sit in the seat next to him--no man would choose to have his wide-knee, wide-elbow stance compromised--so I snagged the window seat in the full expectation of a relatively comfortable ride. It was not to be. Carl, “with blue uncertain stumbling buzz,” lumbered up the aisle and deposited himself between us. He was 70-ish, white, a bit fumbling. He reminded me of my dad.

When drink service began, the man on the aisle ordered a Coke; I ordered a soda water. Carl removed his headphones—he had been listening to a Dean Koontz book—and ordered two bourbons. It was nerves, maybe. Fifteen minutes later he ordered two more, accompanying the request with a whoop of “Why not!” and a gesture I can best describe as jazz hands. Carl was partying on a private jet while the rest of us flew coach.

Of course, any baller eventually has to hit the head. And so Carl made his way to the front lavatory, hovering in the aisle for a while as he waited for the VACANT light to flash. Only the wait was long. I noticed, and I’m sure the people over whom Carl was standing noticed. After a while he headed to the back of the plane. Just as he did, the bathroom door opened. What luck! I would visit the lav while Carl was also up and about and so give the nice man on the aisle a break. (I knew he was a nice man because when Carl spilled bourbon on him, he said, “No problem. No problem,” whereas had Carl spilled bourbon on me it would have been a big problem.)

I made a beeline to the front. Too late, I noticed that the woman exiting the lavatory was wedged into the door. She was the occupant of row 1, an old-ish woman who was traveling with her husband and had, it appeared, purchased two seats to accommodate her size.  I had noticed the two of them, and the empty seat between them, upon boarding and had remarked their appearance. Something about them suggested to me that they hadn’t flown before, or at least not much. Now the woman was caught in the doorway, and I was standing there, and her husband sprang in between us to help her get out. He succeeded, and I proceeded to the doorway.

Again too late to process what was happening or to change course, I detected a foul odor. I remember catching the eye of the flight attendant in the galley—the same guy who had suffered through Carl’s jazz hands—and then entering the lavatory and closing the door behind me. The smell was terrific. I determined to be as efficient as possible: turn around, lift lid, line seat with tissue, pee, close lid, flush, wash hands, empty basin, toss towels, leave. Only, when I turned around and lifted the lid, I was met with a sight unholy, a pile of excrement so large and heavy that it momentarily stunned me. What had this woman done? What had she neglected to do? And why? I thought fast and identified only two options: 1) leave the lavatory and alert the flight attendant to the problem; 2) deal with the problem myself. Option one would embarrass the woman further than she had already been embarrassed (if she had been embarrassed). At the very least, it would draw attention to her and to me. Remember, we were in the front of the plane, and halfway in to a 4.5-hour flight, people are looking for things to interest them. It would also make the flight attendant’s day, pardon my pun, crappy, whereas mine had already taken that turn. So I went with option 2.

I closed the lid and flushed the toilet. I opened the lid. The shit was still there, unmoved, uncaring, unperturbed. I closed the lid and flushed again. Reader, I will spare you the details of the shit’s exodus. I will only say that it took 3 flushes—super-vacuum, airplane-toilet flushes—to clear the runway. When I exited the lavatory, the flight attendant was still there. He, my T. S. Eliot, raised a knowing eyebrow and said, “Would you like a glass of water?”

“Beware death by water,” I thought. And, besides, I could not drink at a time like this. I could only make my way back to the aisle 9 window, past the stares of the couple in row 1—Is she really trying to make eye-contact with me after what she just put me through? Does she think those flushes were mine?—past the nice, large man in the aisle seat, past Carl’s still-empty perch. I buried myself in the book I was prepping to teach, and I tried to ignore the smell of bathroom and bourbon that clung to Carl upon his return. I tried to forget.

A few minutes into our final descent, Carl struck up a conversation with me.

“I can’t help but notice that you’re reading and taking notes,” he said. “Are you writing a paper about that book?” 

I should mention here that I had laryngitis at the time of this flight, so I could barely croak out a response: “No, I’m teaching it.” One would think that the sound of my voice—so pained, so nearly inaudible—would have closed the conversation. But not for Carl. He continued:

“You’re a teacher? What level do you teach?”

“College,” I say.  He raised his eyebrows, not in the T. S. Eliot way, but as if to say, “Wow, I’m impressed. And surprised! And strangely intrigued.” He proceeded to ask me where I teach, and how long I’ve been teaching, and what I teach. He asked me what book I was reading.

“The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells,” I said. I began to tell him something about it, something short, to give him an idea of when it was written and why, but he interrupted me to say that he knows the book. My ass he knows the book. Why would anyone know this book?

“I’m retired,” he said. “I do a lot of reading.” He showed me the long list of audible books he had on his phone.  He actually had some Dickens in there. “To me, work is a four-letter word,” he said, proud of the joke. “I’m taking culinary arts classes at community college.”

The guy wouldn’t stop. Each time I returned to my book, he came at me with more questions and with more unsolicited information about himself, like, “I was traveling to see my son and his kids and, uh, his wife. I don’t know what you’d call her.”

“That’s your daughter-in-law,” I told him.

“Why were you traveling?” he asked.

“I was at a professional conference.”

“Do you have a card?” he said.

“No.”

“A phone number?”

“No.”

And that’s when things got real. “Come on!” Carl said. “Give me a break! I’m trying to pick you up here.”

When I was young, this sort of thing happened with some regularity, always with older men in whom I had no romantic interest, and always taking me by surprise. There was the time that I thought I was getting pre-professional advice from a divorced lawyer twice my age, but in fact I was being auditioned as step-mom for his children, who were, you know, my peers. There was another time when I believed I was learning the ropes of broadcast journalism from a mustachioed producer who, as for himself, thought that he was enticing me to his cabin at Tahoe. All was quiet in my 30s and early 40s, until I met Carl. I won’t be fooled again. I believe that I have reached an age at which I classify as “younger woman” to the retirement set, and I refuse to comply.

“That’s not a good idea,” I told Carl.

“Why? You have a boyfriend? a husband?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Both?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and with some satisfaction, for it is true and it befuddled him.  Fellow feminists, I know I should have replied, “It doesn’t matter if I have a husband, if I have a boyfriend. I’m a free agent, and I’m not interested in you.” But I was flustered, and I took the path of least resistance.  And so it should be no surprise that he answered, “Tell him I tried to pick you up. It’ll make him appreciate you more.”

“He appreciates me plenty,” I said.

“Trust me,” he said. “He’ll appreciate you more.” And then he added for good measure, “Can you blame me, Tiffany? You’re a very attractive woman.”

At this point in my dystopian dream, the plane had landed, and people were beginning to stand up and gather their belongings. I noticed that others had been listening to Carl and me, for they were turning to look at us, and they were chuckling. Really, could this flight get any better?

Here’s how the story wraps up: the passengers of aisle 9 finally, mercifully, began to disembark, when Carl realized he’d left his jacket in the overhead. (“See? You’ve bewitched me, Tiffany. You’ve cast a spell on me.”) He pulled off to the side, prepared to make his way, against the current, back to aisle 9, a determined salmon denied his chance to spawn but ever hopeful, hopeful. I walked at hyper-speed up the gangway, through the terminal, and into the nearest women’s room (sweet refuge from mankind), my lavatory experience all but forgotten. I took my time. Even so, when I exited, Carl was only five paces ahead of me. Unseen, I ducked behind a pillar and waited for a full two minutes before venturing toward baggage claim.

My dear boyfriend was waiting for me. We hugged, we kissed. He took my carry-on bag. We held hands as we made our way to the carousel.  As we waited, Carl approached, wearing the grin of a degenerate Pete Campbell. He sashayed past us—there is no other way to put it—shaking his head with good-humored regret, and said to my boyfriend, “You’re a lucky man.”

I wondered, what does that make me?