1993

 

MARY GAITSKILL

The Girl on the Plane

from Mirabella

 

MARY GAITSKILL was born in 1954 in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in the Detroit area. She left home at the age of sixteen and went to live in Canada, traveling from Montreal to Vancouver and back before settling in Toronto. At nineteen she decided she wanted to become a writer and returned to the United States to take a high school equivalency test and then attend community college. From there she went to the University of Michigan, where she took a BA. She moved to New York City in 1981.

Gaitskill published her first book, a story collection titled Bad Behavior, in 1988; the book was hailed by the New York Times as a work “of unusual importance at this time.” She has since published two more collections of stories (Because They Wanted To and Don’t Cry) and two novels (Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica). She has taught writing at the graduate and undergraduate level since 1993.

Gaitskill became known for portraying sexuality in conflict with social norms; her work has more recently come to examine the social personality mystified by and in conflict with its own nature, or what critic Wyatt Mason called “that immutable question of how we manage to live in a seemingly inscrutable world.”

Mary Gaitskill lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

★

 

JOHN MORTON CAME down the aisle of the plane, banging his luggage into people’s knees and sweating angrily under his suit. He had just run through the corridors of the airport, cursing and struggling with his luggage, slipping and flailing in front of the vapid brat at the seat assignment desk. Too winded to speak, he thrust his ticket at the boy and readjusted his luggage in his sticky hands. “You’re a little late for a seat assignment,” said the kid snottily. “I hope you can get on board before it pulls away.”

He took his boarding pass and said, “Thanks, you little prick.” The boy’s discomfiture was heightened by his pretense of hauteur; it both soothed and fed John’s anger.

At least he was able to stuff his bags into the compartment above the first seat he found. He sat down, grunting territorially, and his body slowly eased into a normal dull pulse and ebb. He looked at his watch; desk attendant to the contrary, the plane was sitting stupidly still, twenty minutes after takeoff time. He had the pleasing fantasy of punching the little bastard’s face.

He was always just barely making his flight. His wife had read in one of her magazines that habitual lateness meant lack of interest in life, or depression or something. Well, who could blame him for lack of interest in the crap he was dealing with?

He glanced at the guy a seat away from him on the left, an alcoholic-looking old shark in an expensive suit, who sat staring fixedly at a magazine photograph of a grinning blonde in a white jumpsuit. The plane continued to sit there while stewardesses fiddled with compartments and women rolled up and down the aisles on trips to the bathroom. They were even boarding a passenger; a woman had just entered, flushed and vigorously banging along the aisle with her luggage. She was very pretty and he watched her, his body still feebly sending off alarm signals in response to its forced run.

“Hi,” she said. “Can I sit here?”

“Of course.” The force of his anger entered his magnanimity and swelled it hugely; he pinched his ankles together to let her by. She put her bag under the seat in front of her, sat down and rested her booted feet on its pale leather. The old shark next to her, with an appraising glance at her breasts through her open coat, made smile movements. The stewardess did her parody of a suffocating person reaching for an air mask, the pilot mumbled, the plane prepared to assert its unnatural presence in nature.

“They said I’d missed my flight by fifteen minutes,” she said. “But I knew I’d make it. They’re never on time.” Her voice was unexpectedly small, with a rough, gravelly undertone that was seedy and schoolgirlish at once.

“It’s bullshit,” he said. “Well, what can you do?” She had large hazel eyes.

She smiled a tight, rueful smile that he associated with women who’d been fucked too many times, and which he found sexy. She cuddled more deeply into her seat, produced a People magazine and intently read it. He liked her profile—which was an interesting combination of soft (forehead, chin) and sharp (nose, cheekbones)—her shoulder-length, pale brown hair and her soft Mediterranean skin. He liked the coarse quality in the subtle downturn of her lips, and the heavy way her lids sat on her eyes. She was older than he’d originally thought, probably in her early thirties.

Who did she remind him of? A girl from a long time ago, an older version of some date or crush or screw. Or love, he thought gamely.

The pilot said they would be leaving the ground shortly. She was now reading something titled “AIDS Wedding—One Last Chance.” He thought of his wife at home in Minneapolis, at the stove poking at something, in the living room reading, the fuzzy pink of her favorite sweater. The plane charged and tore a hole in the air.

The woman next to him was hurriedly flipping the pages of People, presumably looking for something as engrossing as “AIDS Wedding.” When she didn’t find it, she closed the magazine and turned to him in a way that invited conversation.

She said she’d lived in L.A. for eight years and that she liked it, even though it was “gross.”

“I’ve never been to L.A.,” he said. “I picture it being like L.A. Law. Is it like that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen L.A. Law. I don’t watch TV. I don’t own one.”

He had never known a person who didn’t own a TV, not even an old high school friend who lived in a slum and got food stamps. “You must read the newspapers a lot.”

“No. I don’t read them much at all.”

He was incredulous. “How do you connect with the rest of the world? How do you know anything?”

“I’m part of the world. I know a lot of things.”

He expelled a snort of laughter. “That’s an awfully small perspective you’ve got there.”

She shrugged and turned her head, and he was sorry he’d been rude. He glanced at her profile to read her expression and—of course; she reminded him of Patty LaForge, poor Patty.

 

He had met Patty at Meadow Community College in Coate, Minnesota. He was in his last semester; she had just entered. They worked in the student union cafeteria, preparing, serving and snacking on denatured food. She was a slim, curvy person with dark blond hair, hazel eyes and remarkable legs and hips. Her beauty was spoiled by the aggressive resignation that held her features in a fixed position and made all her expressions stiff. Her full mouth had a bitter downturn and her voice was quick, low, self-deprecating and sarcastic. She presented her beautiful body statically, as if it were a shield, and the effort of this presentation seemed to be the source of her animation.

Most of the people he knew at Meadow were kids he’d gone to high school and even junior high with. They still lived at home and still drove their cars around together at night, drank in the small bars of Coate, adventured in Minneapolis and made love to each other. This late-adolescent camaraderie gave their time at Meadow a fraught emotional quality that was like the shimmering fullness of a bead of water before it falls. They were all about to scatter and become different from one another and this made them exult in their closeness and alikeness.

 

The woman on the plane was flying to Kentucky to visit her parents and stopping over in Cincinnati.

“Did you grow up in Kentucky?” he asked. He imagined her as a big-eyed child in a cotton shift playing in some dusty, sunny alley, some rural Kentucky-like place. Funny she had grown up to be this wan little bun with too much makeup in black creases under her eyes.

“No, I was born there, but I grew up mostly in Minnesota near Minneapolis.”

He turned away, registered the little shock of coincidence and turned back. The situation compounded: she had gone to Redford Community College in Thorold, a suburb much like Coate. She had grown up in Thorold, like Patty. The only reason Patty had gone to Meadow was that Redford didn’t exist yet.

He felt a surge of commonality. He imagined that she had experienced his adolescence and this made him experience it for a moment. He had loved walking the small neat walkways of the campus through the stiffly banked hedges of snow and harsh morning austerity, entering the close food-smelling student union with the hard winter air popping off his skin. He would see his friends standing in a conspiratorial huddle, warming their hands on cheap cups of coffee; he always remembered the face of a particular girl, Layla, turning to greet him, looking over her frail sloped shoulder, her hair a bunched dark tangle, her round eyes ringed with green pencil, her perfectly ordinary face compelling in its configurations of girlish curiosity, maternal license, sexual knowledge, forgiveness and femininity. A familiar mystery he had meant to explore sometime and never did except when he grabbed her ass at a Halloween party and she smiled like a mother of four who worked as a porn model on the side. He loved driving with his friends to the Red Owl to buy alcohol and bagged salty snacks which they consumed as they drove around Coate playing the tape deck and yelling at each other, the beautiful ordinary landscape unpeeling before them, revealing the essential strangeness of its shadows and night movements. He loved driving with girls to the deserted housing development they called “the Spot,” loved the blurred memories of the girls in the back seat with their naked legs curled up to their chests, their shirts bunched about their necks, their eyes wide with ardor and alcohol, beer and potato chips spilled on the floor of the car, the tape deck singing of love and triumph. He getting out of the car for a triumphant piss while the girl daintily replaced her pants. In the morning his mother would make him “cowboy eggs,” eggs fried on top of bacon, and he would go through the cold to Meadow to sit in a fluorescent classroom and dream.

 

“Did you like growing up in that area?” she asked.

“Like it? It was the greatest time of my life.” Some extremity in his voice made her look away, and as she did, he looked more fully at her profile. She didn’t look that much like Patty, she wasn’t even blond. But the small physical resemblance was augmented by a less tangible affinity, a telling similarity of speech and movement.

 

Patty belonged to a different crowd at Meadow. They were rougher than the Coate people, but the two groups were friendly. Patty was a strange, still presence within her group, with her hip thrust out and a cigarette always bleeding smoke from her hand. She was loose even by seventies standards, she had a dirty sense of humor and she wore pants so tight you could see the swollen outline of her genitals. She was also shy. When she talked she pawed the ground with her foot and pulled her hair over her mouth, she looked away from you and then snuck a look back to see what you thought of her. She was accepted by the Thorold people the way you accept what you’ve always known. The stiffness of her face and body contradicting her loose reputation, her coarse language expressed in her timid voice and shy manners, her beauty and her ordinariness all gave her a disconnected sexiness that was aggravating.

But he liked her. They were often a team at work and he enjoyed having her next to him, her golden-haired arms plunged in greasy black dishwater, or flecked with garbage as she plucked silverware from vile plates on their way to the dishwasher. She spooned out quivering red Jell-O or drew long bland snakes of soft ice cream from the stainless steel machine, she smoked, wiped her nose and muttered about a fight with her mother or a bad date. Her movements were resigned and bitter, yet her eyes and her nasty humor peeked impishly from under this weight. There was something pleasing in this combination, something congruent with her spoiled beauty.

It was a long time before he realized she had a crush on him. All her conversation was braided together with a fly strip of different boys she’d been with or was involved with, and she talked of all of them with the same tone of fondness and resentment. He thought nothing of it when she followed him outside to the field behind the union where they would walk along the narrow wet ditch, smoking pot and talking. It was early spring: dark, naked trees pressed intensely against the horizon, wet weeds clung to their jeans and her small voice bobbed assertively on the vibrant air. The cold wind gave her lips a swollen raw look and made her young skin grainy and bleached. “So why do you let him treat you like that?” “Ah, I get back at him. It’s not really him, you know, I’m just fixated on him. I’m working out something through him. Besides, he’s a great lay.” He never noticed how often she came up behind him to walk him to class or sat on the edge of his chair as he lounged in the union. Then one day she missed work and a buddy of his said, “Hey, where’s your little puppy dog today?” and he knew.

 

“Did you like Thorold?” he asked the girl next to him.

“No, I didn’t.” She turned toward him, her face a staccato burst of candor. “I didn’t know what I was doing and I was a practicing alcoholic. I kept trying to fit in and I couldn’t.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” He smiled. How like Patty to answer a polite question from a stranger with this emotional nakedness, this urgent excess of information. She was always doing that, especially after the job at the cafeteria ended. He’d see her in a hallway, or the union lounge, where normal life was happening all around them, and she’d swoop into a compressed communication, intently twining her hair around her finger as she quickly muttered that she’d had the strangest dream about this guy David, in which a nuclear war was going on, and he, John, was in it too and—

 

“What did you do after Redford?” he asked the girl next to him.

“Screwed around, basically. I went to New York pretty soon after that and did the same things I was doing in Thorold. Except I was trying to be a singer.”

“Yeah?” He felt buoyed by her ambition. He pictured her in a tight black dress, lips parted, eyes closed, bathed in cheap, sexy stagelight. “Didja ever do anything with it?”

“Not much.” She abruptly changed expression, as though she’d just remembered not to put herself down. “Well, some stuff. I had a good band once, we played the club circuit in L.A. for a while six years ago.” She paused. “But I’m mostly a paralegal now.”

“Well, that’s not bad either. Do you ever sing now?”

“I haven’t for a long time. But I was thinking of trying again.” Just like Patty she looked away and quickly looked back as if to check his reaction. “I’ve been auditioning. Even though—I don’t know.”

“It sounds great to me,” he said. “At least you’re trying. It sounds better than what I do.” His self-deprecation annoyed him and he bulled his way through an explanation of what he did, making it sound more interesting than selling software.

A stewardess with a small pink face asked if they’d like anything to drink, and he ordered two little bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Patty’s shadow had a compressed can of orange juice and an unsavory packet of nuts; their silent companion by the window had vodka straight. He thought of asking her if she were married, but he bet the answer was no and he didn’t want to make her admit her loneliness. Of course, not every single person was lonely, but he guessed that she was. She seemed in need of comfort and care, like a stray animal that gets fed by various kindly people but never held.

He thought of telling her that she reminded him of someone he’d known in Coate, but he didn’t. He sat silently knocking back his whiskey and watching her roll a greasy peanut between her two fingers.

 

Out in the field they were sitting on a fallen branch, sharing a wet stub of pot. “I don’t usually say stuff like this,” said Patty. “I know you think I do because of the way I talk but I don’t. But I’m really attracted to you, John.” The wind blew a piece of hair across her cheek and its texture contrasted acutely with her cold-bleached skin.

“Yeah, I was beginning to notice.”

“I guess it was kind of obvious, huh?” She looked down and drew her curtain of hair. “And I’ve been getting these mixed signals from you. I can’t tell if you’re attracted to me or not.” She paused. “But I guess you’re not, huh?”

Her humility embarrassed and touched him. “Well, I am attracted to you. Sort of. I mean, you’re beautiful and everything. I’m just not attracted enough to do anything. Besides, there’s Susan.”

“Oh, I thought you didn’t like her that much.” She sniffed and dropped the roach on the raw grass; her lipstick had congealed into little chapped bumps on her lower lip. “Well, I’m really disappointed. I thought you liked me.”

“I do like you, Patty.”

“You know what I meant.” Pause. “I’m more attracted to you than I’ve been to anybody for two years. Since Paul.”

A flattered giggle escaped him.

“Well, I hope we can be friends,” she said. “We can still talk and stuff, can’t we?”

 

“Patty LaForge? I wouldn’t touch her, man, the smell alone.”

He was driving around with a carload of drunk boys who were filled with a tangle of goodwill and aggression.

“Ah, LaForge is okay.”

He was indignant for Patty but he laughed anyway.

 

“Were you really an alcoholic when you lived in Thorold?” he asked.

“I still am, I just don’t drink now. But then I did. Yeah.”

He had stepped into a conversation that had looked nice and solid and his foot had gone through the floor and into the basement. But he couldn’t stop. “I guess I drank too much then, too. But it wasn’t a problem. We just had a lot of fun.”

She smiled with tight terse mystery.

“How come you told me that about yourself? It seems kind of personal.” He attached his gaze to hers as he said this; sometimes women said personal things to you as a way of coming on.

But instead of becoming soft and encouraging, her expression turned proper and institutional, like a kid about to recite. “It’s part of the twelve-step program to admit it. If I’m going to admit it to other alcoholics in the program, I think I should talk about it in regular life too. It humbles you, sort of.”

What a bunch of shit, he thought.

 

He was drinking with some guys at the Winner’s Circle, a rough pick-up bar, when suddenly Patty walked up to him, really drunk.

“John,” she gasped. “John, John, John.” She lurched at him and attached her nail-bitten little claws to his jacket. “John, this guy over there really wants to fuck me, and I was going to go with him, but I don’t want him, I want you, I want you.” Her voice wrinkled into a squeak, her face looked like you could smear it with your hand.

“Patty,” he mumbled, “you’re drunk.”

“That’s not why, I always feel like this.” Her nose and eyelashes and lips touched his cheek in an alcoholic caress. “Just let me kiss you. Just hold me.”

He put his hands on her shoulders. “C’mon, stop it.”

“It doesn’t have to mean anything. You don’t have to love me. I love you enough for both of us.”

He felt the presence of his smirking friends. “Patty, these guys are laughing at you. I’ll see you later.” He tried to push her away.

“I don’t care. I love you, John. I mean it.” She pressed her taut body against his, one sweaty hand under his shirt, and arched her neck until he could see the small veins and bones. “Please. Just be with me. Please.” Her hand stroked him, groped between his legs. He took her shoulders and shoved her harder than he meant to. She staggered back, fell against a table, knocked down a chair and almost fell again. She straightened and looked at him like she’d known him and hated him all her life.

 

He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, an overweight, prematurely balding salesman getting drunk on an airplane.

“Look at the clouds,” said the girl next to him. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Lorraine.”

“I’m John.” He extended his hand and she took it, her eyes unreadable, her hand exuding sweet feminine sweat.

“Why do you want to talk about your alcoholism publicly? I mean, if nobody asks or anything?”

Her eyes were steadfast, but her body was hesitant. “Well, I didn’t have to just now. It’s just the first thing I thought of when you asked me about Thorold. In general, it’s to remind me. It’s easy to bullshit yourself that you don’t have a problem.”

He thought of the rows and rows of people in swivel chairs on talk-show stages, admitting their problems. Wife beaters, child abusers, dominatrixes, porn stars. In the past it probably was a humbling experience to stand up and tell people you were an alcoholic. Now it was just something else to talk about. He remembered Patty tottering through a crowded party on smudged red high heels, bragging about what great blow jobs she gave. Some girl rolled her eyes and said, “Oh no, not again.” Patty disappeared into a bedroom with a bottle of vodka and Jack Spannos.

He remembered a conversation with his wife before he married her, a conversation about his bachelor party. “It was no women allowed,” he’d told her. “Unless they wanted to give blow jobs.”

“Couldn’t they just jump naked out of a cake?” she asked.

“Nope. Blow jobs for everybody.”

They were at a festive restaurant drinking margaritas. Nervously, she touched her tiny straws. “Wouldn’t that be embarrassing? In front of each other? I can’t imagine Henry doing that in front of you all.”

He smiled at the mention of his shy friend in this context. “Yeah,” he said. “It probably would be embarrassing. Group sex is for teenagers.”

Her face rose away from her glass in a kind of excited alarm, her lips parted. “You had group sex when you were a teenager?”

“Oh. Not really. Just a gangbang once.”

She looked like an antelope testing the wind with its nose in the air, ready to fly. “It wasn’t rape,” she said.

“Oh, no, no.” Her body relaxed and released a warm, sensual curiosity, like a cat against his leg. “The girl liked it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. She liked having sex with a lot of guys. We all knew her, she knew us.”

He felt her shiver inwardly, shocked and fascinated by this dangerous pack-animal aspect of his masculinity.

“What was it like?” she asked.

He shrugged. “It was a good time with the guys. It was a bunch of guys standing around in their socks and underwear.”

 

Some kid he didn’t know walked up and put his arm around him while he was talking to a girl named Chrissie. The kid’s eyes were boyish and drunkenly enthusiastic, his face heavy and porous. He whispered something about Patty in John’s ear and said, “C’mon.”

The girl’s expression subtly withdrew.

“What?” said John.

“Come on,” said the kid.

“Bye bye,” said Chrissie, with a gingerly wag of her fingers.

He followed the guy through the room, seizing glimpses of hips and tits sheathed in bright, cheap cloth, girls doing wiggly dances with guys who jogged helplessly from foot to foot, holding their chests proudly aloof from their lower bodies. The music made his organs want to leap in and out of his body in time. His friends were all around him.

A door opened and closed behind him, muffling the music. The kid who’d brought him in sat in an armchair, smiling. Patty lay on a bed with her skirt pulled up to her waist and a guy with his pants down straddling her face. Without knowing why, he laughed. Patty twisted her legs about and bucked slightly. For a moment he felt frightened that this was against her will—but no, she would have screamed. He recognized the boy on her as Pete Kopiekin, who was thrusting his flat hairy butt in the same dogged, earnest, woeful manner with which he played football.

Kopiekin got off her and the other guy got on; between them he saw her chin sticking up from her sprawled body, pivoting to and fro on her neck while she muttered and groped blindly up and down her body. Kopiekin opened the door to leave and a fist of music punched the room. His body jumped in shocked response and the door shut. The guy on top of Patty was talking to her; to John’s amazement he seemed to be using love words. “You’re so beautiful, baby.” He saw Patty’s hips moving. She wasn’t being raped, he thought. When the guy finished he stood and poured the rest of his beer in her face.

“Hey,” said John lamely, “hey.”

“Oh man, don’t tell me that, I’ve known her a long time.”

When the guy left, he thought of wiping her face, but he didn’t. His thoughts spiraled inward and he let them be chopped up by muffled guitar chords. He sat awhile, watching guys swarm over Patty and talking to the ones waiting. Music sliced in and out of the room. Then some guy wanted to pour maple syrup on her and he said, “No, I didn’t go yet.” He sat on the bed and, for the first time, looked at her, expecting to see the sheepish bitter look he knew. He didn’t recognize her. Her rigid face was weirdly slack, her eyes fluttered open, rolled and closed, a strange mix of half-formed expressions flew across her face like swarming ghosts. “Patty,” he said, “hey.” He shook her shoulder. Her eyes opened, her gaze raked his face. He saw tenderness, he thought. He lay on her and tried to embrace her. Her body was leaden and floppy. She muttered and moved, but in ways he didn’t understand. He massaged her breasts; they felt like they could come off and she wouldn’t notice.

He lay there, supporting himself on his elbows, and felt the deep breath in her lower body meeting his own breath. Subtly, he felt her come to life. She lifted her head and said something; he heard his name. He kissed her on the lips. Her tongue touched his, gently, her sleeping hands woke. He held her and stroked her pale, beautiful face.

He got up in such a good mood that he slapped the guy coming in with the maple syrup a high five, something he thought was stupid and usually never did.

The next time he saw Patty was at a Foreigner concert in Minneapolis; he saw her holding hands with Pete Kopiekin.

Well, now she could probably be on a talk show about date rape. It was a confusing thing. She may have wanted to kiss him or to give Jack Spannos a blow job, but she probably didn’t want maple syrup poured on her. Really though, if you were going to get blind drunk and let everybody fuck you, you had to expect some nasty stuff. On the talk shows they always said it was low self-esteem that made them do it. His eyes rested on Lorraine’s hands; she was wadding the empty nut package and stuffing it in her empty plastic cup.

“Hey,” he said, “what did you mean when you said you kept trying to fit in and you couldn’t? When you were in Thorold?”

“Oh you know.” She seemed impatient. “Acting the part of the pretty, sexy girl.”

“When in fact you were not a pretty, sexy girl?”

She started to smile, then gestured dismissively. “It was complicated.”

It was seductive, the way she drew him in and then shut him out. She picked up her magazine again. Her slight arm movement released a tiny cloud of sweat and deodorant which evaporated as soon as he inhaled it. He breathed in deeply, hoping to smell her again. Sunlight pressed in with viral intensity and exaggerated the lovely contours of her face, the fine lines, the stray cosmetic flecks, the marvelous profusion of her pores. He thought of the stories he’d read in sex magazines about strangers on airplanes having sex in the bathroom or masturbating each other under blankets.

The stewardess made a sweep with a gaping white garbage bag and cleared their trays of bottles and cups.

She put down the magazine. “You’ve probably had the same experience yourself,” she said. Her face was curiously determined, as if it were very important that she make herself understood.

“I mean doing stuff for other people’s expectations or just to feel you have a social identity because you’re so convinced who you are isn’t right.”

“You mean low self-esteem?”

“Well, yeah, but more than that.” He sensed her inner tension and felt an empathic twitch.

“It’s just that you get so many projections onto yourself of who and what you’re supposed to be that if you don’t have a strong support system it’s hard to process it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean. I’ve had that experience. I don’t know how you can’t have it when you’re young. There’s so much crap in the world.” He felt embarrassed, but he kept talking, wanting to tell her something about himself, to return her candor. “I’ve done lots of things I wish I hadn’t done, I’ve made mistakes. But you can’t let it rule your life.”

She smiled again, with her mouth only. “Once, a few years ago, my father asked me what I believed to be the worst mistakes in my life. This is how he thinks, this is his favorite kind of question. Anyway, it was really hard to say because I don’t know from this vantage point what would’ve happened if I’d done otherwise in most situations. Finally, I came up with two things, my relationship with this guy named Jerry and the time I turned down an offer to work with this really awful band that became famous. He was totally bewildered. He was expecting me to say ‘dropping out of college.’”

“You didn’t make a mistake dropping out of college.” The vehemence in his voice almost made him blush; then nameless urgency swelled forth and quelled embarrassment. “That wasn’t a mistake,” he repeated.

“Well, yeah, I know.”

“Excuse me.” The silent business shark to their left rose in majestic self-containment and moved awkwardly past their knees, looking at John with pointed irony as he did so. Fuck you, thought John.

“And about that relationship,” he went on. “That wasn’t your loss. It was his.” He had meant these words to sound light and playfully gallant, but they had the awful intensity of a maudlin personal confession. He reached out to gently pat her hand to reassure her that he wasn’t a nut, but instead he grabbed it and held it. “If you want to talk about mistakes—shit, I raped somebody. Somebody I liked.”

Their gaze met in a conflagration of reaction. She was so close he could smell her sweating, but at the speed of light she was falling away, deep into herself where he couldn’t follow. She was struggling to free her hand.

“No,” he said, “it wasn’t a real rape, it was what you were talking about, it was complicated.”

She wrenched free her hand and held it protectively close to her chest. “Don’t touch me again.” She turned tautly forward. He imagined her heart beating in alarm. His body felt so stiff he could barely feel his own heart. Furiously, he wondered if the people around them had heard any of this. Staring ahead of him he hissed, “Do you think I was dying to hear about your alcoholism? You were the one who started this crazy conversation.”

He felt her consider this. “It’s not the same thing,” she hissed back.

“You don’t understand,” he said ineptly.

She was silent. He thought he dimly felt her body relax, emitting some possibility of forgiveness. But he couldn’t tell. He closed his eyes. He thought of Patty’s splayed body, her half-conscious kiss. He thought of his wife, her compact scrappy body, her tough-looking flat nose and chipped nail polish, her smile, her smell, her embrace which was both soft and fierce. He imagined the hotel room he would sleep in tonight, its stifling grid of rectangles, oblongs and windows that wouldn’t open. He dozed.

The pilot woke him with a command to fasten his seat belt. He sat up and blinked. Nothing had changed. The girl at his side was sitting slightly hunched with her hands resolutely clasped.

“God, I’ll be glad when we’re on the ground,” he said.

She sniffed in reply.

They descended, ears popping. They landed with a flurry of baggage-grabbing. He stood, bumped his head and tried to get into the aisle to escape, but it was too crowded. He sat back down.

“Excuse me.” She butted her way past him and into the aisle. He watched a round vulnerable piece of her head move between the obstruction of shoulders and arms. She glanced backward, possibly to see if he was going to try to follow her. The sideways movement of her hazel iris prickled him. They burst from the plane and scattered, people picking up speed as they bore down on their destination. He caught up with her as they entered the terminal. “I’m sorry,” he said to the back of her head. She moved farther away, into memory and beyond.