“I would have kept the blanket,” I said.
Jeff smiled. “It was a pretext. Nevertheless, I appreciated what Dennis said. It reinforced my view of myself as a good person, someone who is conscientious, who returns things. I don’t think I would have been able to put it into words at the time, but I saw myself as someone who didn’t do bad things. I guess the rescue could be included in that, but it didn’t feel like the same category, it didn’t feel like a gold-star moment. It was more of an I-had-no-choice moment, as I said earlier. Gun to the head. I suppose that if I’d had a sense of myself as a bad person, a truly evil person, I could have walked away, or short of that, run to the phone in the beach lot knowing that it would be too little too late, that I had sealed a stranger’s fate. But that wasn’t who I was. I was a returner of blankets. I was the good person I thought I was. Don’t forget that.”
Why would I?
A server cleared our drinks and let us know that the buffet was being stocked with lunch items.
Jeff nodded and said thank you but scowled involuntarily at the interruption.
“I drove straight to Mandeville,” he said. “I felt that by going directly there I was committing to decisive action. I told myself that I was giving Francis Arsenault, whoever he was, a chance to complete his gesture, to say his piece, to demonstrate whatever it was he was trying to communicate to me before the paramedics strapped down his arm and carried him away. And, of course, to confirm that he was actually okay.”
Jeff raised his finger, made sure I was looking at him.
“I say ‘told myself’ because—and this became clearer to me later, I didn’t know this back then, I wasn’t wise to it—to put it bluntly, we never really know why we do what we do. The part of our brains tasked with generating reasons doesn’t care about truth… only plausibility.”
He was insistent on making this point, in making sure I’d heard it, and wouldn’t continue until I acknowledged it.
“Mandeville,” he said. “It was a construction site.”
“A fake address?”
He shook his head. “I talked to one of the guys working there. He said that the family had moved into a rental while remodeling their home. Though remodel makes it sound minor. This was one of those teardown jobs where you keep up a chimney and a wall so you can tell the city you’re not starting from scratch. They were going from a ranch-style home to a contemporary folly with lots of glass and angles.”
“Did he know where to find Francis?” I asked.
“He was a laborer. Didn’t even know Francis’s name.”
“It could have been anyone’s house, then.”
“Right. I looked around for a posted permit, but the one I could find had only the name of the builder. Then I heard a car honking.”
“Was it him?”
Jeff shook his head. “Next-door neighbor. Pulling out. She was irked that, in my haste, I’d partially, like two percent, blocked her driveway. I apologized and asked her if it was indeed Francis Arsenault’s house. She looked at me like I was an idiot and said, ‘No, it’s the pope’s.’ Took me a second to register her sarcasm and then she drove around my car exaggeratedly, which she could have done the whole time, without any exaggeration even, but apparently it was a matter of principle.”
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” I said.
“Exactly,” Jeff said. He looked over his shoulder at the sneeze-guarded buffet. “Let’s grab a bite before everyone else hops on it.”
I hadn’t wanted to interrupt his story, but since he’d interrupted it himself, I offered to do what a voice in my head had been telling me to do for a while, which was to check on the flight. Jeff said he’d be happy to grab me a plate.
At the counter I waited behind a swarthy man arguing that he’d been promised lounge access. He was being disabused of that notion by an officious shiny-faced blond woman. Sleek and vaguely Scandinavian, she fit right in with the lounge’s international feel, as if she belonged permanently in the air above the North Atlantic. It was hard to imagine her returning to an apartment in Queens, or, in fact, returning anywhere. The man arguing with her, a rumple-suited sad sack of indeterminate accent and origin, asked to speak to a manager. She stepped around the back of a partition and returned a moment later with a tall distinguished-looking man, someone who in his uniform looked as though he might play the role of a pilot. He moved the disgruntled man down the counter so the woman could attend to me. I saw, by her name tag, that she was the director of operations; his name tag had no title. She was the senior employee, but she had decided not to pull rank on the customer. Instead, in a sort of hospitality jiujitsu, she’d simply deployed a man. And in fact, as I checked in with her about my flight, the employee was saying essentially the same thing that the woman had said to the customer, but the customer was taking it in as if for the first time.
Having witnessed this, I wanted to signal to her, Saskia was the name on her tag, that I found the dynamic regrettable and that while I was impressed with how diplomatically she’d handled it, a part of me wanted to dress down the other customer and let him know that she was the one with all the power, that she had actually held his fate in her hands, but the smile she presented me with betrayed no frustration, no sense of victory or defeat, no sign of the miniature drama I’d just witnessed, and, most significantly, no invitation to share in camaraderie. It was as if the entire past had been wiped away and this moment, her smile, and her chipper “How can I help you?” might as well have been the big bang. I pulled the boarding pass from my pocket and asked about the flight. She glanced at it, typed into her terminal, its keys going clackety-clack, and as she read the screen she pursed her lips at what could not have been good news.
“The delay is ongoing,” she said, “but they could clear it at any time.”
I asked if she knew the cause.
“Eyjafjallaj?kull,” she said with perfect facility. “It is acting up again. They say it won’t be as bad as April, but who can tell?”
I was still trying to untangle the first word.
“The volcano,” she said.
Her eyes betrayed a glimmer of amusement, a perverse delight at the vicissitudes of travel, the things-which-cannot-be-changed, the fates assigned to us by the same gods who abandoned us long ago. It was the spark we see in the eyes of the patrolman shutting down the snowy pass, the local who tells you that you can’t get there from here, the mechanic who informs you that you’re not going anywhere today.
She said she would be sure to make an announcement when she heard anything else.
With that, our interaction was over. She reset herself for the person waiting behind me.
I returned to our seats to find a feast laid out across several small plates on the coffee table, a nonalcoholic beer by my chair. Jeff, clear cocktail in hand, gestured for me to sit. I felt yet again like the guest, being treated well by a generous host. I wondered if this was only friendliness, or a habit of his, or something he was doing by design. He said it was a good thing he’d hit the food early—they were already running low on the good stuff. He’d procured cheeses, crackers, olives, a ramekin of caviar or roe, a smaller ramekin of unspecified cream, a few finger sandwiches, and a cereal bowl of fruit salad.
“I can never control myself at a buffet,” he said. “Doesn’t help that I knew I was getting food for two.”
I told him about the volcano.
“You’d think they could just fly over it,” he said. “But no matter. Where was I? Leaving Mandeville Canyon.”
I reached for a tiny cucumber-and-cream-cheese sandwich. I hadn’t thought I was hungry, but once I took a bite, I discovered I was ravenous.
9