“Do you know my friend Selin? Selin, this is Emery. She does Russian, too.” We shook hands. Emery had a pale face with a round pink spot on each cheek, and very blue eyes.
“Ivan” turned halfway toward us. Except for the crew cut, he really looked a lot like Ivan, even his earlobes. But Ivan had said he was going to Budapest after graduation, and graduation had been several days ago. Several days ago, he had traveled from Boston to Budapest. Therefore, he could not now be on a plane from New York to either Paris or Islamabad.
“We’re going to the bathroom,” Svetlana said.
“Oh,” Emery said in the same pensive voice.
? ? ?
“I’m such a wreck. I can’t even tell you,” Svetlana told me, as soon as the bathroom door had closed behind us. In the past week since school had ended, Robin, one of Svetlana’s oldest friends, had been out of town, and Bill, who was really competitive and with whom Svetlana had always had a sexually tense relationship, long before he and Robin had started dating, had come over every day to play chess with Svetlana’s father and tennis with Svetlana. Svetlana stepped into a stall and I heard the bolt slide. Bill had said something really offensive to her, late at night, in a car. She repeated his terrible words to me from inside the stall.
The toilet emitted its death roar. Svetlana washed her hands and took three sheets of paper towel. “Sasha deals with him the best. ‘Billy,’ she says, ‘you must stop at once this autoerotic babble.’” She carefully dried her hands and threw out the towels. “What do you think of Emery? For some reason she leaves a very strong impression on me. She looks exactly how I picture Nadja, André Breton’s Nadja. I saw her once walking really slowly down Dunster Street in the pouring rain with no umbrella—gorgeous, completely drenched. Naturally, being me, I had a raincoat and an umbrella. I tried to hold the umbrella over her, but she kept stepping away. Her hair and clothes were streaming wet, plastered to her body, with those big blue eyes looking out from her thin face. That’s when she told me she was coming to Paris.”
When asked about her plans, Emery had simply said, in a contemplative tone, “I’m going to be walking some dogs.” Svetlana had asked what kind of dogs. Emery replied, “I don’t know—just some doogs.”
I considered this. “What Russian class is she in?” I asked.
“She just finished 102. Why?”
“That’s the class Ivan took,” I said. “I kind of think that’s him with her in line.”
“In line here, at the airport? Ivan? But how could he have known you were going to be on this flight?”
“He couldn’t. It must just be a coincidence. Or maybe it isn’t even him.”
“Couldn’t he have found out somehow from the ticket office?”
I thought about it. “But the ticket wasn’t even in my name until two days ago.”
“That’s true. It’s enough to make you think he has supernatural powers. Why didn’t you say anything when we walked past him?”
“I wasn’t sure if it was him.”
“Don’t tell me you forgot what he looks like.”
“Well, his hair was too short.”
Svetlana shook her head. “I will never understand you. You realize hair can be cut, right? It doesn’t fundamentally alter your identity?”
“But what if it isn’t him?”
“Well, does it look like him? Except for the hair?”
I didn’t answer right away. “Everybody looks like him,” I said.
Svetlana rolled her eyes. “A seven-foot-tall Hungarian guy who stares at everyone like he’s trying to see through their souls, and you think everyone looks like him. Okay, here’s the plan. We’re going to walk outside. I’m going to talk to Emery, and you’re going to say hi to Ivan. If it’s not him, all you have to say is, ‘Sorry, I thought you were somebody else.’ Simple, right?”
The next thing I knew, we were walking up to them. “So, Emery,” Svetlana said. “Where in Paris are you going to stay?”
“I’m not sure.”
I stood beside Ivan. “Hi,” I said.
He didn’t look at me. “Happy birthday,” he said.
“I didn’t recognize you because of your haircut,” I said.
His gloom seemed to intensify. “That’s why I got the haircut.”
I thought that was funny, but he didn’t laugh.
“I didn’t know you were going to Paris,” I said.
“I didn’t know you were going to Paris,” he said.
Then we stood there not saying anything.
“Well, see you later,” I said.
“I guess so,” he said.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” asked Svetlana afterward.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He sounded angry.”
“You always think everyone is angry. Come on, don’t be morose.” She put her arm around my shoulders. “I tried to find out the situation from Emery, but she doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know why he’s here. They just met by chance in the airport.”
“She doesn’t even know what dogs she’s walking or where she’s going to stay,” I pointed out. “Why would she know his plans?”
“Well, I thought it would cheer you up that at least they’re not going to Paris together. I mean—she is really beautiful.”
We rejoined Robin and Bill. Bill kept asking questions. “Who’s this guy? What’s his name? That’s his name? Selin likes him?” He turned to me. “Why do you look like that? You should be happy. A lot of things can happen in an airplane, at night, thirty thousand feet above the ocean.”
? ? ?
Our seats were all in the back of the cabin, but down different aisles. Ivan was sitting in the emergency row next to a man in a suit. Our eyes met. I couldn’t keep walking because a man was blocking the aisle trying to stuff a large quilt-wrapped object into the overhead bin. It was visibly clear to everyone, including the man, that the object was larger than the bin, but still the situation went on.
“I think we have to talk,” Ivan said.
“I’m in 44K,” I said.
Eventually, a flight attendant took the quilted object away from the man. I found my seat and started to read Madame Bovary.
“Selin!” I looked up. It was Svetlana, leading a grandfatherly Pakistani by the elbow.
“This gentleman has kindly agreed to switch seats with you,” she said.
I didn’t want to change seats. But the man was smiling and looked really proud of his good deed. I thanked him and followed Svetlana to the other side of the plane. Bill was on the aisle seat and I had the window, with Svetlana between us. For some reason, Robin was sitting directly ahead of Bill. They couldn’t talk to or see each other.
Svetlana, who was afraid of flying, gripped Bill’s and my hands. Some flight attendants came out and showed us how we could use our seat cushions to float around on the Atlantic Ocean. The engines started. A muezzin’s call sounded and a praying man appeared on the movie screen, kneeling diagonally toward the ocean.
“Why are they showing that?” asked Svetlana.
“So if you die suddenly you won’t go to hell,” Bill said, incorrectly, raising his armrest. “Here, lean against me.”