LEILA AND I were on the plane bound for Pittsburgh.
The airplane was brand-new. In all my years of flying, I had never before flown on a brand-new plane.
I sat next to the window. I had offered Leila the window seat, but she preferred to sit on the aisle.
The sneak preview of Leila’s movie was set for 8:00 P.M. tomorrow, Saturday. We were going a day early because I wanted to savor being there a day ahead of time and to make sure that all three of us were well rested before the big event.
Billy was flying in from Boston. We had reservations in the same hotel. His room was right next to our suite, and both his room and our suite (I had made sure to request) looked out on the confluence of the three rivers. The three of us were to have dinner tonight. I looked forward to seeing him again. I looked forward to everything.
It seemed so appropriate that the premiere of Leila’s movie and the reunion with her son that awaited her after the screening were to be followed in less than a week by Thanksgiving.
My favorite holiday.
I glanced over at Leila. She was dozing.
The pillow she had requested from the stewardess was in her lap, her arms wrapped around it.
We would have Thanksgiving dinner in my apartment. The three of us. A real Thanksgiving dinner. And all of us would have so much to be thankful for.
The sounds of the jet engines come and go. I hear them and then I don’t hear them, depending on the degree to which I’m absorbed in my thoughts.
Through a gap in the clouds I see the mountains of southeastern Pennsylvania bathed in twilight. Even from the air, I recognize the serpentine curves of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The highways home. Pennsylvania. Ohio. Indiana. Illinois. Driving home from college for the holidays. (The tug of that sound still: Home for the holidays.) And no matter what eventual disappointment greeted me as I entered the house of my mother and father, next year in November I’d be speeding along the highways full of hope again, certain that this time it would all be different. Unlike Ishmael in Moby Dick, I looked forward to November in my soul.
Leila is awake. She is examining her hands, looking at them at arm’s length.
She tried reading Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina in the same way. Lying on the couch, holding the books at arm’s length, first one, then the other. I don’t think she got past the introduction of either one of them.
“Do you think I have beautiful hands?” she asks.
“I certainly do,” I tell her and only then do I look at them.
Her hands, I discover, really are beautiful.
I don’t know how many times I must have seen her hands without noticing how beautiful they were.
Long white fingers. Narrow wrists.
She is captivated by them, as if they were holding a love letter she is reading in front of me.
Somebody must have told her she has beautiful hands. While I was thinking my thoughts, she was thinking hers. The memory of someone telling her that she has beautiful hands.
There is no room in my mind for any more details, if they’re new, of parts of her body. I don’t want to be forced to notice things about her that I haven’t noticed before. I lack the storage capacity, for the time being, for any new information.
The voice of the stewardess comes over the PA system: “Ladies and gentlemen, in preparation for our landing …”
When the wheels of the plane touch the runway, I can’t help thinking, exclaiming inwardly: Pittsburgh!
I reach over and take her hands in mine. My purpose is not necessarily to cover up her beautiful hands, but it does have that effect as well.
We stand and wait by the baggage carousel downstairs, along with the other people from our flight who checked their bags.
We’re all waiting for the carousel to start moving.
This little hitch in an otherwise flawless getaway from New York is beginning to bother me, because it is totally unnecessary.
My tuxedo and whatever other items I needed for our weekend in Pittsburgh were packed in one of those large garment bags designed to be taken on board. Which was what I had intended to do. But Leila didn’t want to take her suitcase on board. Despite my pleas, based on years of flying, she had to have her bag checked. “I don’t want to lug it around with me through two airports,” she told me. “If you want to lug yours, that’s fine.”
Since we were going to have to wait for her bag in Pittsburgh anyway, I saw no point in taking mine aboard with me. So I checked mine as well.
And so now, while I wait for the baggage carousel to start turning, I can’t help fussing about having to stand there and wait. If we had done as I suggested, we could have been in a cab already heading toward our hotel.
It’s not the waiting per se that bothers me. It’s the interrupted rhythm of our trip. We had such a nice rhythm going. Everything was moving right along. We left on time. We arrived on time. And now this.
Standing and waiting. The rhythm of motion replaced by this totally unnecessary immobility.
The moribund crowd comes to life as the baggage carousel starts to turn.
As luck would have it, as luck tends to have it on these occasions, Leila’s soft blue bag is one of the first to arrive. I snatch it off the carousel and wait for mine.
The carousel keeps going around and around. I wait.
A cramp is forming in my stomach.
Had she only listened to me …
I think I see my garment bag but no, it’s somebody else’s, not mine. It’s snatched off the carousel by its owner. I see other people snatching theirs. I see one bald man snatching one suitcase after another off the carousel. Five. I count them. Five suitcases and he’s still not done. He’s waiting there for more. The random dispensation of justice and injustice is making me sick. Five suitcases. The bald sonovabitch has five and I can’t even get my one and only. And I flew first class and I know he didn’t.
I’m beginning to feel like a one-man riot in the making. If I see that motherfucker get one more suitcase before my garment bag arrives …
I look away from him to keep myself from … God knows what. From something.
“Relax, will you,” Leila tells me.
She rubs my back with her hand.
I know that she’s right. I know that I should relax. I know that if there’s one thing I mustn’t do it is to tarnish this weekend by my infantile overreaction to this insignificant little glitch with my garment bag. The last thing I need and the last thing I want to do is spoil the celebratory nature of our reasons for being here. Nothing, absolutely nothing must undermine the upcoming event.
The rational man within me knows this and I know that the rational man within me is right.
There is nothing in that garment bag that is of any value anyway. The single most important item is the tuxedo. But tomorrow is Saturday, and if worst comes to worst and my goddamn garment bag never comes, I’ll be able to rent a tuxedo somewhere in Pittsburgh. Razor, shaving cream, toothbrush, toothpaste, I’ll be able to buy those at the hotel.
I consider leaving. I consider smiling at Leila, putting an arm around her shoulder and saying: “To hell with it. Let’s take a cab to the hotel.”
But I linger and wait. I want this to be a perfect, weekend, and to leave without my bag would taint things. I just want the status quo. Leila with her suitcase. Me with my garment bag.
Leila leaves to go look for a ladies’ room. Her parting words to me are “You’ll see. As soon as I leave, it will come.”
I light a cigarette.
The carousel goes around and around.
The bald man with his caravan of suitcases has mercifully left without my seeing him go. Most of the passengers have gone. The group that remains waiting for their bags is composed (I count them) of seven people besides myself. I have no idea how I look, but the others either look frantic or fatalistic. One man just keeps shrugging.
A modern-day Dante, I think, would have a circle in hell that was the baggage carousel. And there, while it turned, the doomed and damned would be damned and doomed for eternity to wait for their bags which would never come.
Finally, I see my garment bag sliding onto the turning carousel.
I am relieved. I am thrilled. I couldn’t be happier. But the time and passion spent waiting for it to appear have taken their toll.
I get my bag back, but the carefree rhythm of travel is gone. The sense of being in a state of grace where nothing can go wrong.