[I wrote this on my flight to CA. It's still in its early stages and will undergo several more revisions. I haven't written fiction since I was an undergraduate. [Revised at 11:13p ET.]]
17A
“Now boarding Group 4. Groups 1, 2, 3, and 4 should now feel free to board.”
Mark looked at his boarding pass. Again. It said “Group 4” this time, too. The reassurance was nice. He stepped into line behind an Asian family on their way home from Disney—or who had peculiar taste in hats—and in front of an Asian family with no particularly distinguishing characteristics—except their lack of mouse ears.
Mark stood alone between the two Asian families, left hand in pocket, half-wishing he understood more of what they were saying than the few random oddities like “waffles” and “pop-up blocker,” half-focusing on his group number. He handed the attendant his boarding pass. She smiled and scanned it.
Bleep. E-pproval.
“Welcome aboard, Mr. O’Conner. Enjoy your flight.”
He nodded, smiled-of-sorts, proceeded to the jet way.
“17B,” he recited aloud, just before giving into the urge to check his seat assignment for the nth time. Sure enough, with the stoic expression of a cast iron bust, the boarding pass affirmed his seat assignment: 17B.
“Can I help you with any baggage, sir?” The flight attendant was eager enough but overly sweet—a Hershey kiss contra a grandmother’s fudge.
“No, thank you,” Mark replied, bowing his head slightly. She was cute, he noted, and young—but unnaturally blonde: a damn shame and deal breaker.
“You can pick up your bags at baggage claim area seven when we land, then.”
“I didn’t check any bags,” he said, walking past her and down the narrow aisle. He looked back briefly, noting that confusion did not make the girl any less cute—nor any less blonde.
He reviewed his boarding pass. 17B. Not that it mattered. Aside from the Asian families and a handful of sun-seeking-seniors, seats were filled only with a second quarter loss for American.
Mark found his seat, removed his suit jacket, and placed it gingerly in the overhead bin. He sat in the aisle seat, his hand quickly finding its way back to his left pocket. He leaned out slightly to watch the remaining passengers board but saw no one—a row to himself and the rows in front and back of him, too. It was good thinking space. He fiddled with his seat back, flipped through a magazine, read the safety card, then repeated these actions.
The right half of his seat belt fell toward the aisle and he leaned out to grab it. Black flats suddenly came into focus, and in those flats, two feet attached to two legs, long legs, which led to a pale blue dress—the kind you’d see on a member of the royal family or first lady or, at the very least, a railroad executive with something to prove in an industry dominated by the less fair sex. But this woman was none of those people, and the dress, clutched at the waist by a simple black belt and held up by a single shoulder strap, suited her better than any “celebutant.” Mark’s eyes made their way to her face and held there out of desperation, caught in the quickening undercurrent of the greenish blue seas just north of her understated nose. Everything about her face projected confidence—from the hue of her blush to the missing tension from the corners of her mouth. Yet her posture read excitement and her demeanor cautious optimism—or, at least, guarded benevolence. Mark’s lower lip dropped slightly and in place of words gave way to overwhelming silence.
“17A,” she said.
Mark hesitated, thinking that was his seat, but stood urgently after a quick glance at his boarding pass. He gestured her in and she nodded a “thank you” reserved for just such awkward social chivalries. Mark stood for a moment-too-long, watching the purposefulness of her movements and contemplating the stark, inappropriate contrast between her simple black belt that emphasized everything that was perfect about her body and the black lap belt she proceeded to buckle. He was tempted to rip it away like invading ivy from a flourishing oak. Instead he sat down and buckled his own ivy belt and placed his hand back in his pocket.
“I asked for this seat,” she said suddenly, staring out the window. Mark thought her words might shatter the glass as they did the silence, and his head subconsciously tilted with intrigue. She continued, “I like to sit over the engines, to think that such incredible power is mere feet beside me, and to know that I’m remarkably safe.”
Mark was stunned and didn’t know what to say, so he evaded. “I’ll move once they close the cabin door,” he spouted, not because he wanted to but because it would be suspicious if he didn’t offer.
The woman turned from the window with serious inquiry. “Why?” she asked.
“So you’ll have more room.” He attempted a smile but aborted mid-grin.
“Are you saying I’m fat?”
“What? No. You’re… Of course not. I’m just…” He stopped when he noticed her laughing. This time his smile came through as planned.
“It’s up to you,” she said, looking to her cell phone. “I’ve got plenty of room…Mark.”
He removed his hands from the seatbelt, relaxing cautiously, then tensing again as he realized what she said. His puzzled look was her cue.
“Your tie clip. It has your name on it.” She pointed but Mark’s eyes wouldn’t break from hers, so she touched the tie clip with two fingers and pushed it into his chest. Mark noticed.
“Right,” he managed to stammer. “It was a recent gift. I forgot I was wearing a tie.” He loosened the knot in a not-entirely-stereotypical fashion. “Who wears a suit on a plane, anyway?”
“Apparently, Mark does.” She withdrew her fingers and, per the captain’s request, turned off her phone before returning to the window for take off. They sat in silence for longer than Mark could stand until he could find words that didn’t sound entirely superficial.
“Business or pleasure?” he asked, instantly hearing their superficiality.
“Why do you separate the two?” she asked honestly.
“It’s just something people ask. I don’t know.”
“Do you ask it?”
“No.”
“Then why ask it now?” There was no violence in her voice. There was innocence and curiosity and a digestible amount of sweetness, but she wasn’t attacking and Mark never felt as such—just relieved.
He decided to do something out of the ordinary—at least out of the ordinary for the past few months. And he decided to do so because he was sure it would work—this time. He decided to tell the truth. He wasn’t an accomplished liar. It had been too long since he engaged in such frank use of language. No word play. No massaging the point. No meaningless qualifications or empty rhetoric.
Simply: “Because I want to keep talking to you.”
She adjusted in her seat, turning toward him and uncrossing her legs. “Then let’s talk, Mark.” She rested her face on her hand and waited patiently for his words. But when they came, some patience was swept away in a wave of triviality.
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
“California. And yourself?”
“The same. Why are you going?”
“Vacation. You?”
“Of sorts. What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a stripper.”
“No you’re not.”
“What does it matter?”
“It doesn’t.”
“Then why bore us both?”
Mark paused then said the first thing that came to mind. “Truth or dare?”
She grinned and sat up straight. “Truth.”
“What’s your favorite book?”
“No. Ask what you’re interested in knowing.”
Mark thought only briefly. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Right to the point, Mark. Much better. There’s hope for you. And no—not any more. Truth or dare?”
“Truth.”
“Who’s Beth?”
Mark leaned back with the look of a man who had been surprised by a gunshot to the chest. “What?”
“Beth. On your boarding pass, by the group and seat number, you wrote, ‘Goodbye, Beth.’ Who is
she?”
Mark’s smile didn’t disappear, but it lost its edge. He blinked a few times and looked down like a boy being playfully teased by the neighbor’s daughter, his fingers tapping nervously in his pocket. He raised his eyes to hers and answered—not sadly but as a matter of historical fact, as a stenographer’s recording of a procedural request:
“She was 17A.”
Mark waited for her to speak, to inquire further or at least nod knowingly, but she waited equally long for him to offer something further, an explanation or, at least, a nod of an acknowledged past. He had neither to give her nor to give himself, so he said with gusto, “Truth or dare?”
No smile from her this time or hints of empathy but a look of acceptance and a willingness to play along for now. “Truth,” she said.
“Why are you vacationing in California?”
“Do you really want to know that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s not your turn to ask questions.”
She looked annoyed, but it wasn’t annoyance that she felt. It was more like reverence but without the exaltation, surprise but without the wonder, respect mixed with a specific type of desire. Whatever it was, she liked it.
“I’m making a pilgrimage.”
“A religious one?” Mark asked nervously.
“Spiritual. Not religious.”
“To?”
“To an author’s house. She’s dead, and I’m going to pay my respects.” She did not make light of her statement.
Mark paused. “Who?”
“You never heard of her.”
“Probably not. Why are you going? Why does she deserve your respect?”
“Because she wrote something that made me smile during a time in my life when I thought I’d never smile again.”
“What did she write?”
She giggled dismissively—serious but without reproach—and turned away briefly. “Mark, I just met you. It’s way too early for that. I’d as soon sleep with you.”
And with that remark, the attendants with the beverage cart passed them by.
Mark took the moment in a direction that most men wouldn’t. “Then tell me why it made you smile,” he demanded. “I want to know the secret to making you happy.”
Her giggles subsided and her nose unwrinkled. The reflected sunlight from the wing made a valiant effort of highlighting her auburn hair—though, Mark concluded, it demanded spotlight. She never stopped smiling yet exuded the seriousness of an oncologist, the tone of an evangelist, the love of a mother:
“Have you ever felt something so deeply that you can barely recognize that you feel it—something so intimate that your mind knows better than to let you defile it with the pop-trend du jour? It’s there, constantly, as influential as any guardian or sage, yet when you try to examine it, it vanishes, like a shadow upon twilight.
“It’s that feeling of knowing what’s beautiful about yourself and, then, the world; your evaluation of everything simultaneously; your subconscious collection of what’s important and what’s not, what’s private and what’s public, what’s sacred and what’s profane. It’s your reason to get up in the morning and go to a job you don’t particularly want so you can put yourself in a position for one you do; your motivation for running those last 100 yards no matter how your lungs feel or how loudly your heart protests because you want what the mirror will show tomorrow; your desire to continue dating no matter how many times your heart is broken precisely because you know that one day it will be indestructible; your dream and confidence that eventually you’ll attain it
all—the job, the body, the lover…the world.
“And you sometimes get a real glimpse of it, that intimate feeling, and you’re reminded of its reality—when you hear your favorite band or watch your favorite movie or see the rare worthwhile painting. Because it’s more than just art you’re experiencing. It’s you. It’s that…
feeling…that
spark—some call it your soul. It’s
that reflected back at you by someone else who ‘gets it’—a moment when you experience yourself outside of yourself, as an entity, as a unique, infinitely priceless part of the universe at large, as a thing worthy of
your love.
“What she did, the author who I’m proud to honor, she wrote something that expressed everything I’ve ever wanted to say about myself but couldn’t find the words, or images, or sounds to do so—everything I’d ever for a moment considered part of that thing I call ‘me.’ I looked into her words and saw what everyone calls the Face of God. But as Its face, I saw my own.”
Mark clenched his fist in his pocket, a futile effort to resist the intimate question. Their eyes kept pace with their emotions—synched and with gregarious fervor. He confronted the exigency with notable strength but lost, finally asking, “What did she say that made you smile?”
Her eyes broke with his for the first time in what-felt-like-days and her smile turned into the smirk of a supremely confident youth, one who has no cares in the world not because she cares about nothing but because she knows precisely what’s required of her at every moment. Her eyes darted back to his. Her lips moved with the precision of an architect’s compass.
“Her words are her own. But in
my words: she said that I didn’t have to be ashamed of it—that self-feeling—that, more so than anything I could find in the world or in other people, it was good. It was to be worshipped.”
Mark couldn’t help it, so he gave in to his smile and giddiness. She smiled back, bigger than the last.
“Truth or dare?” she asked as a moment’s exchange of inviolate joy.
“Dare,” said Mark, with all the panache of a 17-year-old at post-prom.
She lifted the armrest between them, unbuckled her belt, freeing the blue dress from undeserved restriction, and leaned toward Mark—it was less than a moment before he completed the circuit with tilted head and eyes slowing closing. His vision gave way to sensation. She was there, he knew, because he felt the fire she set raging through his cheeks and his chest to the tips of his fingers. He tasted her mouth and felt her teeth tug on his bottom lip. They were hearing each other and breathing each other and, with unashamed intimacy, becoming another. It lasted a while, a year, three seconds, who cares? It
was.
Their lips made a desperate cling as their faces departed and taste reluctantly abdicated to vision. Her greenish blue eyes projected the strength of tempered steel and her lips the desire of a lifetime of seeking and, at last, having found.
“Was that your dare?” asked Mark, already knowing the answer, in a tone that had all the makings of a whisper but with the vigor of a valedictory address.
He brushed the hair back from her face with his right hand and relaxed his left in his pocket. She confirmed, “Of course not.”
Mark leaned forward again with the intent of concretizing her words. She placed her hand on his left arm, not to stop him—it did—but to emphasize what she was about to say.
“I dare you to show me what you’ve been holding in your pocket—whatever it is that requires your grip and attention.”
Mark sat up purposely and without hesitation. He had already decided what to do with the contents of his pocket, but her dare—her rightful request—only affirmed his choice. He withdrew his clenched fist from his pocket and slowly extended his arm toward her. His fingers opened to reveal an unassuming black box.
“It’s…” he started, but she shook her head.
“I know what it is…what it was.” Her hand ran down his arm and to his fingers, where she assisted him in closing his hand around the box. Mark brought his fist to his chest and, as a flight attendant walked by with an open bag for garbage, he reached across his body and deposited what was left of the past year where it properly belonged.
“Please bring your seat backs forward and fasten your seat belts. We’re preparing to land.” The cute-yet-blonde flight attendant flashed a smile at Mark and a friendly-ish grin at his seatmate before walking to the back to tell a pre-teen to cease his texting.
She looked down briefly to comply with the flight attendant’s orders, but before she could finish buckling, she felt a warm hand on her cheek. She looked up in time to see the determination in Mark’s eyes.
“I…I know it’s wrong,” he said, not believing a word of it. “But…”
“You’re boring me again with your proletariat morality.”
He kissed her for the second time in so many moments. She could feel his smile. She smiled back into his lips. When it ended his hand stayed in place, his thumb rubbing gently against flushed skin.
“Where are you sitting on the connector flight?” she asked, leaning her head into his palm, really only needing to know that he would be on the next flight. “I’m in 18C.”
“29F,” replied Mark, drinking from the calmed waters of her once riptide eyes. “It’s a window seat. I’ll have it changed.”
* * * * *
They walked off the plane together—neither with bags but possessing more than they boarded with. They stopped momentarily to help an Asian family take a picture and proceeded to the ticket counter.
The gentleman working behind the computer eagerly obliged their request for seats together, assuming the couple had been split up by improperly purchased tickets or the random happenstance of computer error. He was more than willing to play their personal Cupid.
“Name, sir?” he asked, more chipper than usual.
“Mark. Mark O’Conner.”
“Thank you, Mr. O’Conner, and your wife’s name?”
They both turned to her, Cupid with a toothy grin, Mark with a “husband’s” gentle leer. She looked to Mark, put her right hand in his left, and turned to Cupid.
“Mrs. O’Conner,” she said.
