[As seen and overheard in San Francisco’s McCarren Airport on June 11, 2010]
Given how much they are hiding from each other it is inevitable that they will fall in love. She smartly sits on the stool beside him, camouflaged behind a cheap travel necklace which has been layered on an artificially inflated décolletage that is itself pushing down on a lightly spanked tummy and a stale lungful of smoke from the cigarettes we catch a whiff of as she walks by. Once seated, she promptly disturbs the inner edge of his personal space with the calculated crossing of her waxed calves. For his part he appears smitten with the tits and the legs, but would never let on that he hates the way she does not initially look at him even though he too is good looking and even though he knows that she knows she could bend him over his stool and make him slap his own ass in exchange for her phone number. The two of them are fools and liars, in the same way all the rest of us are fools and liars, but when she giggles softly after he opens up and tells her that he doesn’t think there’s an airport bar left in North America with which he’s not intimately familiar, they both seem to realize that something will happen between them at this bar that will be just as thrilling and lovely in the present as it will be mind-numbing and slightly sorrowful in the future.
Now, it is important to note here at the top that it will be her chuffing giggle which, within a year of their wedding vows, will cause him to semi-seriously consider slapping her. They will be setting the table in the custom built house they bought with their combined PR agency and stockbroker incomes and he will drop a massive porcelain serving plate on his foot. She will ask him if he is alright and when he says he is not but that he’s used to bearing his pain quietly she will giggle just a bit too sarcastically (again hiding something) in that nasally, deviated septum way of hers. It is then that he will realize how this giggle and the ten thousand times he has heard it have built up in him until he sees fire whenever he hears this broken down racket. He will quickly get over it after she reaches down and picks up the plate, stroking his foot lightly for a moment before she rises to kiss him on the cheek. But this will be a turning point in their relationship, pre kids and post infatuation, when they both realize that neither of them is completely stacked up to what they supposed the other would be.
He orders her a glass of wine and the conversation turns to sports. This is a safety move and a way toward the possibility of more serious exploration in the moments to come. You can see that she has learned that a) guys like sports, that b) she likes guys, and that c) she needed to learn to like sports too - or at least to know enough to pretend - in order to hold a man’s attention after flirtation and following sex. He bites, and when she talks about the Knicks and the Yankees and the Giants as her Knicks and her Yankees and her Giants, you can almost see him crossing most of the other women he’s been dating off his list. The Celtics are playing the Lakers on the TV suspended over the top shelf liquors and when the home team scores she boos demonstrably. That cinches it. He decides that she has now earned some other talk besides sports, and he asks where she‘s from. Well, funny you should ask, she says, because I live out here, but I’m headed to the east coast where I was born and where my older sister is getting married next weekend. Wow, he says, what a coincidence, I was born back east too, and now I commute between our offices on the east and west coast, and are you in your sister’s wedding party? Well, yeah - we never really got along when we were kids, but now I’m actually her maid of honor.
Ironic as it may seem, her older sister will be a big problem for them, especially after their second child is born. It’s true that the girls never did get along when they were kids and, contrary to what our girl at the bar would like us to believe, they still don’t get along now. Anyway, the older sister also never liked this guy at the bar, ever since her younger sister called him spur of the moment the day after their serendipitous meeting and asked him to be her date at the wedding the following Saturday. So when, after 7 years of marriage and in the tenth year of their relationship, this couple at the bar had their second child, the older sister was flaming hot with jealousy (having never been able to have her own kids) and overflowing with anger at the distance her younger sister had put between them. This somehow led to deeper fights between our couple at the bar, awful fights in full view of their newborn and their 3 year old, as the older sister conspired to turn her parents against them. Strangely enough, however, this couple was stronger then we might have imagined and they endured if only halfheartedly and only after a future bout of infidelity and a trial separation (which we will get to later). And the older sister? Well she never really will come around; although years later she will come down with breast cancer which will once and for all end the anger she feels for her little sister.
Within the background hubbub, you can see the both of them trying to stay tuned for the announcements of their respective flights even though they are drawing more and more intimate attention from each other with each moment that goes by. They are into future plans by this time – an idea she has to work for a year in Rome or Paris where pretty English speaking PR agents with American accents are paid handsomely; another idea he has to start a brokerage firm on the sea coast of South Carolina where property is still cheap and good face-to-face financial advice is as scarce as snow – and yet you can just tell that neither of them can help but seriously play with the idea of each other’s face on the pillow next to them in the here and now. By the time the traveler with the Willy Loman suitcase and the hair-hat toupee tilts off his stool to the left of them you notice by the way they are talking that they are feeling good and alone in this crowded bar, indeed that they are the only ones in the whole airport. So, when business cards are exchanged in order that neither can get too far from the other, one can sense that there is already a mutual jealously over potential other lovers who might be waiting at the end of a jetway somewhere down the line.
For twenty years this jealousy will simmer until it finally rises into a full head of steam for her when he cracks up over a woman he meets on his daily commute, starting the affair by having sex with her in a bathroom on the train. Their youngest child will be in sixth grade by this time and the other a freshman in high school, and she will kick him out of the house never expecting to be living with him again. She starts smoking once more during this time of their separation and to her surprise she loses the weight she’s been trying to work off for the last fifteen years. She contemplates going back into PR and likes the fact that she no longer has to babysit his overbearing superior cautiousness. What is most unexpected is that she has actually begun to think how good life might be on her own (if only she didn’t still get so lonely at night). And then one day she drops the kids off with him at the apartment he is renting and she sees how he is living. The piles of uneaten food, the shirts he doesn’t wash in favor of just buying new ones, the total lack of regard for his surroundings and the obvious fact that no woman has set foot into this place in months breaks her heart – a heart she should have suspected would be broken in every possible way from the minute she laid eyes on him in that airport bar. Oddly, however, it is the thought of the two of them sitting in that bar way back when that eventually gets her to allow him back into the house, albeit with conditions on his freedom that would have made a dumber man run for his life.
When her plane is called it’s not completely clear to him (although it is clear to us) when and if they will ever see each other again. On the other hand, anyone with a brain can see that she is already sure how this will play out (starting, presumably, with the phone call she’ll make to him the next morning and moving on to the weekend wedding she will seduce him into). She’s never been shy and - having met him tonight - she isn’t going to start by being shy now. She slowly (and you might even say a little achingly) draws herself from the swivel stool, dipping a bit to reach behind her for the telescoping arm of her rolling suitcase. When she straightens up he is also standing to say goodbye and their faces are closer than they have been this entire time. You just know that each would really like to kiss the other – cheeks, lips, ears, anywhere above the shoulders where there is flesh – and when they both stop talking for a moment and she smiles directly into his brown eyes, it’s almost as if their heads have become living bone magnetized by the promise of love. It happens fast and sudden, his lips leading the way as if on rails toward the inside edge of her cheek, a centimeter or two from the pointy corner of her mouth where he kisses her in a way that amounts to more than the thirty minutes they have spent here. It’s hard to tell from this angle, but when she breaks the attraction and pulls away, it looks as if she might have winked at him. If it did happen, it wouldn’t be hard to think of this batting eye as the first stitch set in a seam that will get longer and tighter in the hours, weeks and months to come. She walks away and the last thing he sees before she rounds the corner to her boarding area is the floor edge of her suitcase where the hard little wheels have to be reminding him that what goes around will come around again and again and again.
His youngest daughter will still be using this same suitcase nearly thirty years later. It’s old but the kid really loves her mother’s vintage bag, though she really couldn’t tell you why. Watching her roll this thing out to the car as he and his wife prepare to take her to college, this man we first discovered at the bar cries for maybe only the third or fourth time in his adult life. He quickly runs to the bathroom and washes and wipes and then washes and wipes again until the trace tracks of tears are gone. But there it is, as it was all along, a sensitive man who ultimately knows how to treat a good woman at a bar and how to come to her when she calls and how to miss her when she’s gone.
One could keep imagining what happens to our couple from the bar after he leaves the bathroom - the car ride to the state school 50 miles way, the unloading, the goodbye and then the return home to a finally empty house where the two of them will once again be as alone as they felt that first night in the bar - but what would be truth and what would be fiction. Take what you can and then add your own life here. You might as well. All happy relationships are alike in the same way and all sad ones as different as you and I, making our own relationships the only ones worth dwelling on.
When his plane is called a few minutes later he doesn’t immediately leave the bar. A new woman has taken the place of the girl who just left even before the seat next to him got cold. There was a line waiting to sit down and so it is inevitable that someone would take her place. What is not inevitable is what he will do next. The new woman, skinnier and more tightly put together, smiles at him when she catches his eye as he reaches across the bar for his check. Does he smile back? Does he offer to buy her a drink? Does he look at the game and then back at her to see if she is at all interested? Does he?
Great story!
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