Fear of Flying

Already when Rico said, “You’ve got to meet this girl,” Henry was interested, partly because his tone of voice suggested layers of meaning just under the surface. “She’s a great producer,” he said. “Created a lot of shows. You’ll like her.” Henry thought their connection went beyond a sharp interest in art.

Henry’s own art was floundering. Needed a boost. True, Rico had landed him some smaller shows in L.A.’s outlying galleries, and there was that article in Art Review (promised but not yet published), but Sarah Kozen had contacts back East, sez Rico, and that, since the hub of the universe of art was located there, could be most helpful.

Along with functioning as Henry’s unofficial art agent, Rico was a friend. He was interested in more than just the visual blast from the canvas. He always wanted to know how Henry’s life was going. By now he had a pretty good idea the marriage had fallen apart and Henry and Sophie were headed to divorceville.

Henry was attending a luncheon for regional artists when Rico told him he’d arranged for him to meet Sarah that day. “She can only stay a minute but she’ll be here right after lunch.”

When she came into the room Henry knew immediately it was her. Energy pushed up. Others there seemed to know her. She had glistening black hair that bounced in long, loose curls along her shoulders. Her face was delicate, olive complected, suggesting a northern Mediterranean ancestry. She held her shoulders back, perhaps to support her slightly-larger-than-average breasts. She wore a red, tight-fitting two-piece suit which accentuated her narrow hips.

Pretty girls are not very friendly. So it came as a shock that she was warm and genuinely interested in his work. She said Rico had showed her some brochures and she thought they might work together on something. They shook hands. She kissed Rico on the cheek and she was gone.

Two months later, in town for a convention, she came to Henry’s studio. She liked his paintings and asked questions about his mentors, his training, what direction he thought his work would take. She stood close at times, touched his sleeve when making a point about convergence or the source of light in a painting. She was reading behind the paintings the open book of his life.

She invited Henry East to meet gallery owners in Boston. Henry said yes, finding himself strangely lifted by this idea but there was a problem.

He had developed a morbid fear of flying. It started when his heart went bezongas a few times in art school, probably when he was drinking too much coffee and staying up too late to meet project deadlines. The doctor said it was a harmless arrhythmia but it frightened him. When the fear checked in it made it hard to break back into normal rhythm. His artistic imagination took over and he became afraid of the fear itself, afraid it might, uncontrolled, propel him into danger. This created a cycle of self-perpetuation in which fear made the prospect of the arrhythmia match up the prospect of fear which made the prospect of long trips cooped up in tight spaces of an airplane seem like death on the doorstep.

Still, he knew, that if he was to advance in the art world he couldn’t just sit at home and cast canvasses to the wind. Even great painters had to market themselves. It helped greatly that Sarah seemed to be such a nice person, a significant convenience which only added to his attraction. He decided to fantasize about her and maybe that seduction along with a couple of scotches under his belt would allow him to make the trip.

He managed to climb aboard. But moments came when he felt a huge adrenaline surge: closing of the cabin door, the irreversible whisk of takeoff, the isolation 35,000 feet over desert with no landing strips below, thoughts that, on upswing, multiplied when fear saw them coming. He was a trap, spring-mounted. Over Denver he considered what would happen if he couldn’t make it and had to ask the pilot to land. He imagined airports like stepping stones between Los Angeles and Boston. Stupid. Get a hold of yourself! He looked for relief. He found that the only thing powerful enough to take down the buzz of fear was thinking about sex.

So he watched the fight attendants especially when they reached up into the overhead bins, and felt like a pervert. Shit! Well, you gotta do what you gotta do. And when the flight attendants weren’t available, he conjured up Sarah’s face, the image of her moving comfortably through a room, what her waist might feel like drawn tight against him. It gave him courage. In this manner he assembled the little short steps, propelled by sexual fantasy, which made it possible for him to make it to Boston without dying or running up and down the aisle like a fucking maniac.

Sarah met him at the airport. He was full of self-congratulation, locked into an exhilarating, if hidden, celebration of courage and adventure and the realization what all this could produce in the way of transformation for the meek and the feeble. Seeing her made him rush with anticipation. She was lively, intelligent, bubbling with enthusiasm about galleries, the art community, the critics... it seemed like reentry into a friendly, safe planet. He liked it here.

And he should do this more often.

She lived outside of town but had a small studio in the city which she opened for Henry. She dropped him off and returned an hour later to take him to dinner. Cita con Abinez was a small restaurant on the Charles, the boats making their way home in sunset light. He was in another world. It seemed everything they talked about had an intensity and clarity of newness to it.

“I’m going to take you to a lot of galleries. You know that.”

“Looking forward.”

“That’s how you get ahead in this business. It is, though you may not like to think it, a business.”

“I’m learning that. Even though I might like to just hide away with my art.”

“No one would ever see it that way.”

“Sadly.”

They watched the river move a while. There seemed to be no urgency to do otherwise as if the time to be satisfied with just the motions of a river had come. They felt the energy of water pushing down to the sea. Henry liked the curves in the riverbank. “So sensual,” he said.

“Just like an artist,” she said.

They laughed.

She fondled her glass of Chardonnay. “Henry.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to know that although I am taking you to galleries I believe art lives best in the home, mixed with furniture, and children and things we collect which help bring our souls to the surface.”

Henry shook involuntarily. He paused to let what she just said sink in. “We are so alike,” he said.

Sarah smiled and touched his hand, leaving her fingertips barely grazing the part where it split into the fingers which made his art. “You know about the Bane Collection?” she said.

“I must have been asleep that day in art school.” Henry liked being educated by someone so knowledgeable and aggressive as Sarah. ”Tell me,” he said.

“Dr. Bane lived outside Philadelphia. Made a lot of money doing something or other and bought great art, Rembrants, Piccasos, you name it. He didn’t like the elite or the way they feigned artistic appreciation so he housed his collection out in the boondocks. He hung his art amid elegantly furnished rooms with sofas, chairs, tables... they way you might live surrounded by art, only he did it for you. Elegant! Absolutely correct, I say. When he died he willed it to Lincoln University but the collection eventually fell into the wrong hands and got sold off for profit. Much like the classic auto collection at Harrah’s. A real shame.” Sarah leaned into Henry so close their lips were almost touching. “But his example is how art should be done,” she said.

They walked along the banks of the Charles as the electricity of their talk and the necessity of their addiction to art animated their bodies such that they brushed arms and shoulders, part by accident, part, it seemed, by plan. She stopped to point out an island she liked to sail out to and Henry put his arms around her from behind, allowing his thighs to snug up against her hips. She stayed there a brief instant, then gently moved on.

Two days they showed his paintings to the galleries, pieces he had sent ahead. It was going well. They began to bask in the glow that happens rarely in the art world when someone from the outside decides to take a liking to your work. The excitement of that. The opening of possibility.

They were almost giddy when she took him back to the studio and sat with him on the bed sharing hopeful talk about what might develop from this venture.

“Are you a light to dark man or a dark to light man?” she asked.

Henry pondered the question. “Both,” he said.

‘No, seriously.”

“On a blank canvas I lay in my shadows first. The dark underpinnings that give me the feeling of heft. Then I lay over that the lighter tones, realizing that they are no longer pure color, but tonalities complicated by darkness... as I guess as we all are.”

Sarah moved against him and put her head on his shoulder. “Go on,” she said.

“But I do something a little different,” he said. “I do kinda what the Society of Six did. I ramp the color down a couple of notches on the wave length chart. That’s what gives me all the orange you see in my work.”

“Nice hearing you talk about it.”

“Not just another crazy artist babbling?”

“Not.”

Henry suddenly kissed her. Expecting rejection he bounced off. When he noticed she hadn’t offered resistance he kissed her again and placed his hand on her thigh. Partly from Henry’s eager pressure against her and partly because of some unseen agreement within her, she leaned back onto the bed. Henry was kissing her more vigorously now, his hand riding up her thigh to the baby soft part along the necks of her two lithe swans. He lightened his touch to a brush of fingertips, up one thigh and down the other, drawing circles closer and closer to the heat just above.

She was tonguing him, getting more and more animated. He put his hand directly on the little mound the labia make when gathered together under the tight embrace of panties and pressed there. She gasped. He pressed harder, rubbing up and down in the moist crease. She jumped up. “No,” she said. “We can’t do this.” And without saying anything more she bolted from the room, her shoes akimbo at the bedside.

Hours passed. No call. No word of tomorrow’s schedule. She wasn’t answering her pages. It took a long time for Henry to get to sleep.

Henry had a late afternoon flight next day to Los Angeles. They were set for a lunch together and she showed up, but late, which he had learned was her habit, yet it resulted in extending the anxiety that he’d ruined something precious. She picked up the discussions as if nothing happened.

“Three galleries are interested,” she said: “Stoffer, Robbins and Neikita. It’s a good start but I’ll have to stay on top of them. These things don’t just happen.”

She also had a flight that day. She was going out to Chicago to meet with the museum staff there about another project.

“Maybe we should take the same flight,” Henry said.

She brightened. “Nice idea,” she said.

Henry was filled with hope once again, and relief, not minding the confusion it brought. He rerouted his flight so that there was a change of planes in Chicago.

Henry was packed but Sarah had to run by her place and gather a few things. “I’ll just zip in for a minute,” she said. “Why don’t you come along?”

She began throwing things into a travel bag and raving about how convenient such inventions were. “Especially for shoes,” she said. Henry remembered the shoes at the bedside but said nothing. “You should get one,” she said, and she leaned over to gather up several shoes from the floor of her closet. It seemed she stayed there a long time. Henry didn’t mind because he was admiring her. He put his hands on her waist. She stayed bent over, rummaging furiously. Henry drew her to him, pushing against her from behind. She stayed there swaying a little, side to side in the press of connection.

They were heating up but the doorbell rang and one of her girlfriends let herself in. She just had to tell her something before she left. Henry was numbed by sheepishness, concealing as best he could his not-so-soft penis.

The girl friend had to find a place to buy linen only Sarah knew about, so she followed them in her car. Sarah was to indicate the place on the way to the airport. Encouraged by their recent encounter Henry placed his arm on her shoulder and rubbed her back and neck. Sarah told him not to do anything her girlfriend could see from the car behind so he put his hand on her thigh, just under the hem of her dress.

As she drove she chatted about the girlfriend and her boyfriend and their penchant for film noir, how they couldn’t decide whether to live together because of his attachment to an old converted warehouse she detested. They were carrying on like this while she was driving and looking in the rear view mirror to see if the girlfriend was still behind. He tried to imagine what she felt, keeping eye contact with her girlfriend while Henry was stroking her leg.

Henry watched the action of her foot on the peddles, the added movement it gave her leg, feeling that under her pantyhose. The risk of it all... He slid her dress higher reaching his fingers to the little V in her panties, then down beyond her thigh as far as he could reach and not appear through the back window to be up to something.

The girlfriend finally found her turnoff and left. Now only auto safety was the limitation. He returned to wet spot of sweetness in her panties. By the time they stopped in airport parking he was stroking her hard.

She leaned her head in her hands. “You make me a bad girl,” she said.

“Not bad, just... appreciated.”

They kissed. “We have to get to the plane,” she said.

They had seats together, middle and window. The aisle seat was vacant. As the plane took off the sun was approaching the horizon, enlarging with the orange passion made richer by the Bostonian haze drifting westwardly. They picked at dinner, floating on wings and a sexual heat Henry had not felt for years.

Conversation took on the suggestion of promise: shows, travel, Bostonian weekends, money, nice dinners. Henry’s life was feeling a vast broadening.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I never liked to fly.”

Henry looked at her with a new range of vision. “You never liked to fly? I’m the worst. How do you manage?”

“It has to be done. Necessary.”

“Yeah, me too. It has to be done if we are in the professions we are in. Goes with the territory. Though it took me a long time to get there. Took some pretty intense reasons to break the habit.”

Food trays were gone, drinks served. The sunset had enriched the dinner hour and now they were chasing the edge of night. The flight attendant came through turning off the overhead lights and everyone settled with pillows and blankets.

Under Sarah’s blanket Henry’s hand returned to her lap. The plane was rocking slowly. The jet sound mesmerizing the passengers into a high-flying stupor. The two just sat where they were not needing anything, not wanting to be anywhere else. Sarah hummed softly and then turned around to lay her head on Henry’s lap. Henry scooted over to the aisle seat to give more room for her.

She drew the blanket to her chin. Henry put his hand under and went straight for her breast. All that tension made him do it. She drew the blanket all the way over her head as he stroked her. He was loosening her breasts from their fastenings when she began a little tugging motion with her hand on his arm which seemed, without saying so exactly, to be drawing his hands downward, downward. She wanted him there again, he realized. He couldn’t believe his luck. But he wasn’t ready to give up the breasts until he had run his hand under her bra to pinch the nipple of first one then the other. Okay, he thought. Now. He drew his hand over her stomach, over the mound of her pelvis to the wedge that lay under her dress. Pulling her dress upward he forced his hand into the tight sheath of her pantyhose and dove into her folds for the first time. They were very, very wet and her lips were larger than he expected. He grasped them between fingers and palm and squeezed and tugged. She was hairy and the clitoris was bulbous and hard and flipped back and forth when he ran his finger over it.

Ironic, he thought, this was happening to him on an airplane. God must be rewarding me for something.

He entered her, with one finger then with two, moving in and out a little, as if his sex were beginning to open her. He circled the rim of her, feeling it slide underneath his touch like the lips of an open mouth. There was nothing he could see of her in the dark. She was anonymous except for the memory of her and the sensation that touch gave him. He shoved his fingers all the way in, down to the widening part where they join his hand, deep enough so his fingertips could feel the ball of her uterus which he could fulcrum first one way then the other. It made her twitch and thrust.

She was breathing hard under the blanket and Henry was afraid that others in the cabin might be awake or moving up and down the aisle and discover them. He looked, but, as if out of out of some in-the-movies courtesy that defies reality, no one roused. No one noticed.

She was near coming. Henry debated whether, under the blanket, to undo his pants. He remembered her my mother’s watching me attitude and was afraid things might be ruined if he did so. Also, though he was very wet at the tip he was embarrassed not to be hard yet. What would she think? On the other hand, this episode was never going to repeat itself, ever. He had to go for it.

He slipped his hand from behind her head to touch her face. His fingers found her mouth and dipped into the little valley alongside the teeth and came up with a warm wetness which he slathered over her lips and chin.

When she was wet he unbuttoned his jeans and fished out his penis. It was tumid, weeping mucous of excitement at the tip. He picked up some on his fingertip and brought it to her tongue, pushing his finger over the sand-paper valley in its center, slipping in and out of her mouth. She took a deep breath and writhed gently on his lap. He explored her mouth with his finger, keeping the probing from below at a slower pace.

She was rising into her breathing again, tensing the muscles of her body and trunk, Henry decided it was now or never. He stroked her cheek with his tip and she turned her face away. But then she turned right back. He repeated this gesture a couple of times. Always she turned away as if feeling a deep responsibility to demonstrate resistance - that, “you’re making me a bad girl” stuff again - but then... she always turned back. “Force me,” she seemed to be saying.

There were two parts of her in this gesture: nice-girls-don’t-do-this, and please-help-me-submit-to-what-I-really-want-you-to-do. There was one way to find out which one of her was present.

He took the bulbous part of him and holding the opposite side of her face in place with his fingers, slipped it between her lips pressing it there with his thumb. She turned away. But this time when she turned back she opened her lips for it, still making little turn-away gestures that faded like small echoes giving in to silence.

Suddenly, she sucked hard on him, drawing him farther and farther in. He was glad to be half-hard and still flexible. Three more sucks and she took it all, down to the root.

He picked up the pace down below, lifting her pelvis with the force of his thrusts. He looked around. Still no one around. Her breathing tightened, squeezing against the strain, then slowed. Her body stiffened and released a few times then lurched forward, jackknifing in staccato jerks, Henry’s penis falling out of her.

The walls of her sex squeezed his fingers in the rhythm of his own coming and brought him close to the brink. He rubbed her folds and she jerked her hands down on top of his, pressing him hard against her. The contractions came again, then everything released.

Without hesitation she took him in again. Henry lost his concentration on Sarah’s body, her part over, and let himself, disembodied, drift somewhere above their two locked bodies, somewhere outside the plane among the stars, hovering in the red plasma of space between Boston and Los Angeles, resisting nothing, afraid of nothing, proud to be given over to the electric squeezing and sucking and... in the incredible irresistible danger of their circumstance released all his worry...

He slumped. She produced a Kleenex from somewhere, wiped her mouth, his tip. Then sat up, abruptly, careful to leave the blanket over his lap.

A few seconds passed.

“I have to freshen up,” she said. And with that, off she went to the bathroom.

Henry had not spoken, unable to rouse from the sleepy haze that lingered. In the moments that followed, the drone of the plane grew louder then fell back as if Henry were on the edge of consciousness, that sensation that comes in the swell of hallucination when fever distorts the mind and the senses respond to some other plan.

He straightened himself, zipped himself, and put the blanket under the seat. As if on cue the flight attendant came through to announce the plane would be landing soon, and a minute later, the lights were on.

What seemed like a long while passed before Sarah came back, looking as if she had found the Macy’s cosmetics counter among the chemical toilet and toy sink. Her lips bloomed with fresh wet vibrant color.

Lipstick! Oh my God! Henry looked at his pants. There was a little smudge-blossom on his fly. For a moment he was tempted to leave it as a mark of a daring encounter. But, overcome by the swell of Sarah’s generosity, he wanted no trophy from her.

“Did you know you were going to do that?” she asked as the plane began its descent and she settled into the seat one seat away from him.

Henry laughed. “No,” he said, which was part truth and part lie. “No idea.” And in the same moment it struck him as interesting how she thought of it as his doing it to her, as if the credit or blame were his alone. She was apart from him now. Ah yes, back to the decorum of a formal life.

The plane landed and they gathered up their things. Outside they stood around with the young man from the art museum who had come to meet her, talking about local artists and the upcoming show they were planning as if that’s all they had thought or cared about, the secret of their in-flight romance as invisible as the... oh, the lipstick?

There was a little bit left, but as they weaved and dodged in conversation Henry discretely covered it, or uncovered it deliberately teasing Sarah. He watched the animation of Sarah’s body in conversation with the young man and confessed to himself a little jealousy, no, more like a sense of passing her, as in an old fashioned square dance: “alamand left with your left hand, back to your partner with a left and right grand... ” no room for selfish disappointment. Sarah had been very good to him. Very good, indeed. He owned part of her now, and she, part of him.

He released the sense of ownership sex will often generate in favor of the generosity that a deeper connection brings and gave himself permission to want her to go to this new man and enjoy the freedom that meant.

They waved goodbye in that official manner that covers up many things. As Henry waited for his change of planes he thought about this business of flying, how the whole idea had been oddly transformed for him. Maybe out of facing his fear had come the exposure he needed to undo this internal tangle that had so inhibited him. Maybe fear is connected in some mysterious way to an equal force in the universe which has the power to neutralize it. He was feeling pretty lucky. Pretty wonderful, he thought, basking in the unpredictable generosity of life.

He knew one thing more. His fear of flying was over.