I snatched my phone and looked to see if Jack had texted, called, done anything. Then my finger snapped on my contacts, and I hit Jack’s name, and I poked it. My phone connected with Jack’s phone, and I thought madly about things to say—Hey, Jack, where are you? You disappeared. Hey, Jack, I’m standing at the gate, and they’re calling our flight, and I thought you might want to hustle along now … but he did not pick up. The call went to his answering message, and I took a deep breath, opened my mouth to speak, then softly hung up.
The airport people announced they were now boarding section one on the plane, please have your boarding passes ready and your passport opened.
I moved slowly into the boarding line. I looked down the walkway in the direction where Jack had disappeared, and I thought, Now he will show up, here he comes, he must be moving toward me now, what a funny joke, what a nut, how kooky is this guy? It occurred to me he might even be on the plane already. Maybe it was all an insane mix-up. Then one of the airline people asked for my passport, and I handed it to her. She scanned it and handed it back to me. I said okay, thanks, but mostly I watched her mouth move, and then we went down a long passage toward the plane door, and I stepped on, removed from France’s earth at last, and I handed my documents to a flight attendant, a woman with plenty of makeup and a smile that came too easily to her lips, and she nodded and pointed me toward the back of the plane. I passed the bulkhead that separated first class, and I kept going, and then I arrived at my aisle and row, and I slipped in, sat down, and kept my eyes forward. Jack was not sitting next to me.
*
I threw up in the plane’s restroom before we had taxied an inch.
It came like a wave, and I couldn’t resist. I voided everything. After a while, after throwing up three times, someone knocked on the door and asked in French if I was all right.
“?a va,” I said. “Merci.”
The person said something rapidly in French.
I repeated, “?a va.”
*
After great pain, a formal feeling comes. That’s what the poet Emily Dickinson said. As I sat waiting for my flight to start its taxi, the minutes passing, the reality slowly, painfully becoming incontrovertible, I felt a rigidity enter my posture. I sat more upright. Yes, I would be formal. I would accept what I could not change. I would not, could not, cry anymore. It sounded like Dr. Seuss. Would not, could not.
I put my phone into my pocket and turned it off.
I did not try to read. I did not check my e-mail. I did not drink or eat. I sat and felt strangely solid. This had happened. That’s what I told myself. I had been played for a fool, and I wasn’t the first woman to believe a man’s lies, nor would I be the last, but this counted for a lesson learned.
I did not permit myself the luxury of searching the faces of my fellow passengers for Jack. I didn’t pass any longing looks toward the front of the plane. He was not coming; he did not come; he did not want me after all.
A little later a bright, red-lipsticked flight attendant told me to buckle up, and I did. She smiled. I smiled back.
We took off a little later. The plane lifted, and Jack was not with me. We passed through a cloud, and Jack was still not with me. I asked the attendant for a gin and tonic, drank it, asked for another, drank it, asked for a third, drank it. She refused to give me a fourth. I put my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes.
It’s over, I told myself. Maybe it had never been, had never actually existed in any sense that mattered. I reached down to my purse and slid my Smythson out of my bag. What I could do, what I had always done, was to stay organized. I had ignored the Smythson too long. I opened it carefully, as if calling a friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and my hands moved slowly through the pages. Appointments. Assignments. Forms. Birthdays sketched in pink ink through the year. I leafed through the pages slowly, resolutely, and I did not cry. Why cry? We had had Paris and Amsterdam and Prague and Kraków and salt mines and milk barges. That was a good summer. That was a good trip. I slipped the pen out of the tiny holster on the Smythson and darkened a square around my work start date. I darkened it until the pen tip nearly pierced the paper. The clouds floated below us, and nothing seemed solid any longer.
When I tried to slide the Smythson back in my bag, it refused to enter. I jiggled it, angling it so it had to go in, but something continued to block it. I reached down inside the bag and pried things around. My hand fell on Jack’s grandfather’s journal. I knew its feel before I even put my eyes on it. It turned me cold. I felt my chest compress, and it made it hard to breathe.
“Would you take this and throw it out?” I asked the flight attendant the next time she passed by. I held the journal out to her. It still possessed a perfect weight and size for my hand. I believed that if she took it, if she freed me from its touch, I would be restored.
“Sure, honey,” she said.
She gave me a fake smile and tossed the journal in a tiny refuse bag she had carried down the aisle. She did not examine the journal at all. She smiled brightly and continued on, the journal no more or less than a saggy weight in a bag reserved for peanut wrappers and swizzle sticks.
She covered half the distance back to the galley before I screamed for her to stop.
I made, in the vernacular, a scene. I was aware of making a scene even as I performed for it. Deep inside, I blamed it on the drinks. I blamed in on my emotionally overwrought condition. But self-knowledge didn’t prevent me from surging down the aisle, my balance off, tears starting to cloud my perceptions.
Watching me advancing toward her, the flight attendant made a face that said clearly: Calm down, you little bitch. The last thing she needed was a madwoman passenger.
“Sorry,” I said, leaning in to whisper to her. “Love letters and things from an old boyfriend.”
“Oh,” she said.
Only she said it this way: Oooooooooooo.
Then she held out the bag, and we enacted a reverse trick or treat, with me digging through the trash to secure the journal. When I finally fished it out, I clutched it to my chest.
“I’ve been there,” the flight attendant said. “Exactly there.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll bring that last gin and tonic, okay? But you just get some sleep after that.”
I nodded and bobbed my way back to my seat. The rest of the world felt far, far away.
Part Two
New York
39
If you’re going on a date, a fix up, would you rather be in the bar waiting for the guy to show up, or would you prefer to make an entrance, scan the diners and drinkers, trying to pick out the friend of a friend who is supposed to be cute?
Worst-case scenario, you don’t know if you are early or late, because your heart isn’t into it, but you have come out of some sort of prescriptive push from two friends at work, and this is what people do, this is one way they meet, so you have said yes, okay, all right, I’ll meet him, thanks.
His name is Gary.