THERE WERE TWO OTHER passengers aboard the old attack bomber that carried the very junior Senator home for Easter. There was the young man named Stanley, a long-time friend, and the very pretty little schoolgirl whom they had met only that morning. The Senator’s name was Neil Christiansen, and he wanted desperately to sleep. But the two younger people wouldn’t hear of it. They wanted so many other things. They wanted first of all to talk and have a United States Senator — even a very junior — for an audience. The seatbelts were annoying and they would have liked to unfasten them; they would have preferred another brand of cigarettes and certainly something else, anything else to read besides Business Week and World Oil and the dreary Journal of Commerce. They wanted a fourth for cards too, but Neil had already made it clear to them that he wasn’t to be regarded even as a third.
The two young people fell mercifully silent for a moment, thinking. There was the colored steward who sat up front, strapped into one of the reclining seats, but the girl said she didn’t feel especially democratic on this particular morning. There was another silence, and then she said: “We could get one of the pilots to play cards. It’s been done before. We don’t really need both pilots.”
“We do today, honey,” Stanley said. “They’re both busy plotting the weather.” He stared out the window, looking glum, and added: “I think we’re in a typhoon.”
“You don’t plot weather,” the girl said. “You plot courses … you chart weather … I think. They’re just sitting up front worrying about the weather.”
The girl was eighteen years old and a freshman at Sweet Briar. Such a pretty little girl, Neil thought. She’d changed from her saddle oxfords to I. Miller pumps for the flight home from school on the Easter weekend. Her father was a vice-president, and at eleven o’clock that morning, with the weather raging outside and the old attack bomber nearly caving in, she wanted a martini.
“Very dry,” she called out, moving her head dreamily from side to side.
The colored steward, strapped in the reclining seat, failed to respond, but at such a distance and with the kitchen supplies rattling round in the galley the girl could not be certain if he had heard. She turned back to Stanley.
“Give him his walking papers,” Stanley said.
“Can’t do it,” the girl said. “My father’s only a vice-president. We can complain, but we haven’t yet got authority to discharge the help.”
The old bomber rocked along; the sky was the color of grubby linen. The turbulence was periodic, almost rhythmic, and occasionally there would come a reverberating thud followed by the clatter of pots and pans and canned goods spilling out of the galley. The first time it happened they thought the old plane was breaking apart. It was an A-20 from the war, converted into a passenger ship of conventional oil country opulence for use by the company’s junior grade executives. Earlier that week one of the Washington representatives had mentioned to Neil that the company plane would soon be flying south, and the possibilities had seemed endlessly appealing in the beginning. The idea of special treatment and semi-privacy had been partly responsible for his decision. But there were some convincing and less snobbish arguments to be advanced. The private flight would be faster, for one thing: a more or less direct course from one capital city to the other. There would be none of the schedule conflicts, delayed departures, cancellations, tiresome layovers or missed connections that seemed always to plague him at crucial moments on commercial flights. He needed all the time he could get at home on this Easter weekend — and it was, Neil thought, grinning foolishly to himself, a goddam lot cheaper.
But he was paying for it now, he decided. One way or another — a year off his life or a pound off his own middling young flesh — he would pay. There seemed to be even less privacy with just the three of them and the steward on board. And there was the weather; the weather was at the heart of his problems at the moment. One of the larger commercial airliners could have at least got out of the turbulence by climbing to the higher altitudes. But he had been informed shortly after take-off that the pressurizing system on the old attack bomber had somehow, suddenly ceased to function, and now they had been forced to flap along for two hours through the middle of a spring storm that seemed to have embraced the whole eastern seaboard.
Neil lay back in his seat, gripping the armrests as the old bomber pitched violently. He tried to remember what it had been like twelve or fifteen years before (how long had it been?) when he’d flown the Mustang fighter. Goddam hot pilot … A riot … It must have been … Like driving Andrea’s M.G. for the first time … And nothing like this weak-ribbed A-20, side-slipping worse than a rowboat on the downside of some monstrous swell. He looked round the posh interior of the plane, noting padded walls, deep pile carpets, creaking card table and uniformed steward, and was reminded of certain elegant, meticulously restored Georgetown row houses, their pasts incredibly recaptured with a faint whiff of antiquitous plumbing and half a century of historical rat droppings.
The plane seemed to give up the struggle for a time and ride with the wind. Stanley and the girl resumed their conversation.
“But what do you really do?” the girl wanted to know.
“I go to movies — lots of movies,” Stanley said. “Then I go home and write long, involved, arty criticisms. I finally sold a review last week to some hipster magazine. Fourteen bucks!”
“I mean what do you do for the Senator?” the girl said, looking first at Neil and then at Stanley. “I thought you worked for the Senator.”
“Only part-time,” Stanley said. “Only on assignment. I float around a little. I’m a ghost errant.”
“You write speeches for him?”
“I compose speeches, honey,” Stanley said. “Mind the genteelisms — I try never to miss them.”
The girl’s expression was suddenly, improbably serious — and somehow comic. “Do your real, your compulsive interests,” she said, “lie in art or politics?”
After a moment Stanley realized she really was serious, and he tried not to smile … not just yet. Like an interview with a college journalist, he thought. And now Neil had heard the question too; Neil was turned round in his seat, staring, smiling faintly, waiting to hear his reply. “They don’t mix,” Stanley finally said.
“What?”
“They don’t mix — art and politics — like Scotch whiskey and Pepsi-Cola they don’t mix … I mean how can you keep the issues in perspective? You imagine writing an epic poem and expecting to Say Something Important, like in Lippman’s column? If I let an issue creep into one of the speeches I’m composing for Neil, it just sort of erupts and runs bloody all over the prose.”
“He’s right,” Neil said, smiling at the girl. “The speeches he writes for me are rarely ever flawed by even the suggestion of issues …”
“Can you imagine,” Stanley said, “can you imagine real people going around agonizing about fluoridation and dental caries or recognition of Red China or the goddam hydrogen bomb?”
The old plane lurched downward and sideways; blankets and pillows and small bags descended on the passengers from overhead racks. There was an extended sensation of free fall, and then they were pulled up brutally against their seats. They lay fast against the cushions until, as suddenly as it had come, the pressure eased. A flash of pure sunlight could be seen through the windows, and one of the pilots appeared up front, smiling, as if it had all been happening right on schedule.
“You survive that last bump?” he said cheerfully. “We’re about out of it now. There’s perfect weather from here on in …” He moved down the aisle and began clearing the litter. The steward rose and joined him, setting kitchen stocks back in cupboards. The pretty little girl finally got her martini. Neil and Stanley had whiskey. It was half past noon, and the steward had begun to prepare frozen TV dinners in the oven.
Stanley raised his glass in a toast. He wished them a happy Good Friday.
The hours of His deepest passion, Neil thought … They just didn’t make passion like that any more. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen real passion, but nothing came to him. It was all a cheap imitation, a fraudulent compound of polemic, spleen, and seasons of rut. Whare’s all mah passion? Earlier that morning, dressing for the flight home, he had stood staring at himself in the bathroom mirror … “I grow old …” he had said aloud, and Stanley’s voice came to him from the next room: “You’re the Very Junior Senator — that ought to help some.” It wasn’t really much help, though, and least of all on this Good Friday with the two younger passengers there beside him. He felt nearly feeble next to them, with none of the compensations of age. He was the Very Junior Senator and there were nice gray patches in his dark hair and some interesting lines appearing at the corners of his eyes and round his vaguely dissipated-looking mouth. But all that was irrelevant … frivolous … He welcomed the one thing but could not avoid the queasy notion that he was losing all of the other. A most difficult year: like a young girl approaching her menses. Was there some precarious balance one struck between wisdom and resignation, passion and repose?
He sighed, settling in his seat as the steward placed the steaming precooked dinner in front of him. The thawed vegetables were of incredible shades of green and orange; they simply weren’t convincing. He picked at the tray of food … Ersatz stuff? … In the space of a few seconds he was visited by a great weariness. He pushed the food away and settled in the chair, lowering the backrest. He felt certain that he would be able to fall to sleep. God! How monumentally bored he was with all tired young men — and by the melancholy notion that he might qualify as one of them. He closed his eyes.
“Do you really manage to make a living out of all those part-time jobs?” the girl was saying to Stanley. “Fourteen dollars for an article isn’t going to take you very far.”
“No … No …” Stanley said. “Neil’s really the source of most of my income. We were roommates at college. We’re old friends … This is a real boondoggle, honey …”