When they were at the bar catching their breath a few minutes later, she asked one of the bartenders, a young thing in a tight denim shirt and straight black hair that fell to her waist, to bring him a shot of tequila.
“Oh, man, I shouldn’t,” he said, laughing, his cheeks flushed, but he took the small glass.
“Of course, you should,” Cassie told him. “It’s well after midnight.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Witching hour.”
He took one of the drapes of his hair and pushed it back behind his ear. “Seriously?” He had asked the question sincerely, as if he expected he was about to learn something. It was almost sweet.
Still, she was surprised at his reluctance to go from tipsy to drunk. It was a shot of tequila. One shot. They weren’t talking about heating a spoonful of crack. She expected more from an actor, even one who had grown up in Fairfield County, Connecticut. She was holding her shoes, and she put them down on the seat of the empty barstool near them. Then with one hand she reached out and took a rope of that magnificent mane of his, not at all surprised at how soft it was. With the other she took the small glass she’d ordered for him and swallowed the shot of tequila. The burn was deep and hot and seemed to ooze out from her chest like an oil spill. It was heavenly. So much for not drinking tonight.
“And yet you passed on the beer,” he said, smiling. His grin was childlike, his eyes impish.
“I like tequila.”
“But not beer.”
“I’m a flight attendant, remember? The uniform is unforgiving.”
“Do airlines still worry about weight? Can they do that?”
“It’s vague. Weight must be proportional to height. But you really can’t do your job if you’re fat. I’ll be in the gym again tomorrow.”
“Because you fly?”
“Because I’m vain.”
“Tell me the craziest thing you’ve ever seen.”
“As a flight attendant?”
“Yes. You hear stories that are just insane.”
She nodded. She honestly couldn’t say whether flying made people weird, or whether people were inherently weird and a closed cabin just made it more apparent.
“You hear them,” she said. “We live them.”
“I know! Tell me some. Tell me one.”
She closed her eyes and saw Alex Sokolov in the bed beside her. She saw once again the deep, wet furrow across his neck. She saw herself crouched against the drapes in the hotel room in Dubai, naked, his blood on her shoulder and in her hair.
“You should have a shot, first,” she said.
“That bad?”
“I’ll have another one with you.” She slipped her shoes back on, trying not to focus on how filthy her feet had become, and took his hand and led him to the bar. She wasn’t going to share with him the tale of the young hedge fund manager who had died in the bed beside her on the Arabian Peninsula. There wasn’t enough tequila in the world to get her to tell him that nightmare. And so instead, as they dared each other to keep downing shots—a second, a third, a fourth—she told him of the passengers who had tried to open exit doors at thirty-five thousand feet and the couples who honestly believed they were being discreet when their hands were under the blankets while the rest of the cabin was asleep. She told him of the man who had tried to climb over the beverage cart—he got as far as one knee on the top and his foot on the bag of ice on the shelf—because he wanted to get to the bathroom and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) wait.
She shared with him her encounter with the rock star who purchased the entire first-class cabin for himself and his entourage: “I wasn’t allowed to speak to him. I had to whisper the drink and menu options into his bodyguard’s ear. I wasn’t even allowed to make eye contact with him. The flight was an overnight to Berlin and he didn’t sleep a wink. Even though the lights were dimmed and his party was sound asleep—his bodyguard, too—he went into the lavatory and changed his clothes three times, each outfit more outrageous than the one before it. For about an hour and a half he was in a gold sequin jumpsuit and platform heels, and his only audience was me.”
She told him the different locales on the plane where they tended to stow the tough cuffs, and the different occasions when she had needed them to restrain a passenger.
And then she told him about Hugo Fournier. She wasn’t sure he would know the name, but he would know the story. He probably presumed it was an urban legend. But it wasn’t. She’d been there. She’d been on the flight.
“So, we’re flying from Paris to JFK. It’s a route I bid on a lot. I was younger then and so I got it less often. This was eight years ago. And when I got it, I usually had business class.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“No, it’s just that sometimes it can be a difficult cabin. On some aircraft, in first everyone has a flat bed and is out like a light pretty soon into the flight. In coach, there’s really not a whole lot you ever have to do. But business has thirty-two seats and there’s almost the same cabin service as first. And they sleep less. So, some flight attendants feel it’s a little less desirable, which means that whoever’s working in it might have less seniority.”
“Okay.”
“So, this particular flight is packed. Not a single empty seat. Maybe an hour west of Ireland, when we’re on dessert in business, this guy who has been flying with the airline forever pushes past me to get to the chief purser, who is working in first. He is oozing adrenaline, and the idea crosses my mind that there is some mechanical disaster. I literally think, an engine is on fire. No more than thirty seconds later, I hear the chief purser on the intercom asking if there is a doctor or nurse on board. She sounds pretty cool, but I hear just a quiver of desperation. Of course, I’m also relieved that we’re not about to ditch in the ocean.”
“Of course.”
“There is a doctor. There are, in fact, two. One in coach and one in business, and they both rush to seat twenty-four E, where Hugo Fournier, old and diabetic and obese, has just had a massive heart attack. The doctors, one female and one male, and the flight attendants lay him out on the floor in front of the galley and emergency exit row, because that’s where they can find the most room. They get out the defib and work on the guy, and they work him hard. The doctors try everything, and they don’t call it for at least forty minutes. Everyone in the cabin knows what’s going on. His wife is freaking out. She is shrieking and pleading and crying. Can you blame her? It’s not a dignified performance, but it’s a real one.”
“God…”
“Yup. But now we—you know, the crew—have to do something with the body. We can’t put him back where he was. He’s in the middle of economy and while those are the cheap seats, people still don’t expect to sit next to a corpse. Plus, he’s covered in vomit, and while we could clean that off his shirt and pants, we couldn’t clean off the stench. And the body did what bodies do when they die. Poor Hugo Fournier had crapped his pants.”
Buckley put his hands on his face and shook his head. “I do know this story.”
“Of course you do.”
“You put him in the bathroom for the rest of the flight.”
“Well, I didn’t. But, yes, the crew did. I actually lobbied that we try and get one of the people in first to give up their flat bed, but our chief purser wouldn’t have it. I suggested we put him in one A or one L, so almost no one would see him or smell him. But she wouldn’t even ask. So, yes, one of the doctors and two of the male flight attendants wedged him into the starboard, midcabin lavatory. The doctor—a pretty judgmental guy, in hindsight—said it was like getting a size ten foot into a size eight shoe.”
“And you didn’t turn around.”
“The plane? No. We were already over the mid-Atlantic. We didn’t want to inconvenience two hundred and fifty-eight people. And so instead we inconvenienced one. She just happened to be a widow. A loud widow.”
“Amazing.”
“Or appalling.”
“You got that Scheherazade thing down,” he said.
“Most of us are pretty good storytellers,” she agreed. “We are the kings and queens of the degrading.”
“Where did you say you just flew in from? I can’t remember.”
“I didn’t say.”