The Entire Predicament Read online

  Still, all he’s said so far is “Well.” I think about luck of the draw. I think about the other sides of coins. I think about probability and about economics. We’ve taken off, and are past the concerted gunning upward through cloud layers, but before the fully leveled off, and before the plinking to dark of the no unbuckling and getting out of your seats sign. I’m self-aware enough to know that this, what I am doing, is panicking, and it might be being accompanied by nausea or shortness of breath, and I might be having difficulty noticing which one because of the panic, but either way the remedy is the same, I realize, and start pawing through the blue seat pocket, looking for the little white air-sickness bag with its wire closure thing constructed, disconcertingly, like bags for coffee beans. But there is no little bag in the pouch because they’ve gone the way of peanuts, I’m guessing, or it got used in a previous flight and because of gas prices no one goes through to restock. I scramble around in the middle pocket, too, and find nothing but magazines and headphones that have lost their foam ear cushions.

  Then my jaw drops because I realize, in my panic, I am giving the Marine exactly what he wants, which is a chance to help me out by, perhaps, looking in his own seat pocket or asking me what’s wrong, because something is terribly, terribly wrong, as anyone could tell by my panicking demeanor. I keep my eyes buried in the seat pocket as these ideas come into focus for me and the ideas—mostly because there are a number of them and they come methodically paced and in a row—serve to calm me enough that by the time I turn my head on my neck with skeptical deliberation, I am actually feeling fine. I do feel tense and expectant in my back teeth, but relaxed almost everywhere else, which I notice as I turn my head like that nice guy in the airport who dropped something, because I am bracing myself to get a look at my Marine’s face, and when I do, I see he’s got headphones on, and his eyes are closed, and he’s either asleep or listening carefully to extremely boring music.

  I think about this.The almost-completely-relaxed feeling I continue to experience arrived, I realize, from suddenly having no idea what was going to happen. Let me try to think of something it’s like: I’m married again, this time to the Everyarm, and we’re having a dinner party and we’ve been fighting again so I’m waiting for the fight to bubble up in conversation. I’m poised for it all evening long, which I’m used to by now because this is what they mean by marriage is work. At this point, we’re in the living room, which looks great because I spent a lot of time arranging the living room, and people are lounging on multiple levels, one on the sofa with his legs stretched out, one, a woman in a peach-colored outfit, on the carpet, leaning sideways against the ottoman at the knees of another woman, this one in lavender (it’s spring and I brought in a lot of tulips), both eating pie à la mode from china plates, all these darlings arranged as if by their own will on the platforms I set there for them (I used to be a window dresser and this brings back the days). So far the evening has gone in waves, each course, each tableau, as we move from the foyer to the patio, to the dining room, and so on, each another setting for the way I’m waiting for our argument to bubble, and then one of my invited guests, the one in lavender, stands up, and then the one in peach does, too—both of them do—they pull the barrettes from their hair, take their blazers off, take their shoes off, rip the sides of their skirts so they can waggle their knees freely, and, I don’t know, dance? Strip? Walk out? Start smacking people or juggling the fruit from my fruit bowl? Turn into butterflies? Are those the only options I can come up with? My point is that someone else takes over. Someone, preferably some nice girl in pastels with a sweet tooth, will start doing something, and I have no idea what, and I can stand there at ease in the doorway and not even wonder what Everyarm is doing behind me in the kitchen.

  Plus, it makes something else beautiful happen, this moment when I give up, which is that in the process of leaning back into my seat to look at the Marine properly, I run my eyes along the job he did shaving, and along the lines that come from his eyes, and along the stray hairs of his eyebrows, which are quivering almost imperceptibly, and one or two are gray or at least look it for a shivery second, and only because of the care with which I am looking do I perceive this movement. It’s easy to see what has been produced. It’s a brief if bona fide affection, it’s the magic of silence and stillness, the pause that makes anything possible, the mystery of the interior lives of animals, the sense of character one gets from a blooming field, or a craggy beach, or a drenched log, or a tundra, or a lawn, or a curving range of mountains.

  I just can’t take it for very long.

  I lay one hand on my seat belt and with the other hand remove my book from the pocket. Then I fasten my eyes on the row of lighted signs, fasten more specifically on the one about getting up to move about the cabin. I tilt forward in my seat, draw one set of toes behind the other, poised, ready, and when the thing clicks off and emits a rounded-off version of “Bong!” I’ve ripped open my belt and am out of my seat so fast I think the vacuum I’ve left will surely wake him. Lucky I’m not there to see it. I sprint to the lavatory as if I’ve been expelled from a cannon, as if either this much speed, or something in the lavatory itself, will actually allow me out of the entire predicament.

  I feel good about the lavatory because of how the door closes only if you latch it and if you latch the door, the message behind the glass changes colors and slides from vacant to occupied, words that mean a lot to me in this environment. Still, I experience a wave of anxiety, an echo of sorts, as I slide the latch from one place to the other. As a child, I spent the time in unfamiliar bathrooms imagining I lived there, that I snuck in and out a secret passageway and that the little room held everything I needed, that my bed folded down from a wall the way, it occurs to me now, the flight attendants’ seats pop out in some smaller aircraft designs. I’d picture where there’d be a burner for cooking or a refrigerated slot where I could push a button and the next thing to eat would slide out. What was attractive about this imagined way of life? Nothing wasted, everything merely sufficient, simply enough, no room left over, no confusion, a lot of silence. Elemental. But I was also a verbal child. I don’t know what childhood has to do with it anyway. People go there for easy answers.

  I don’t throw up in the lavatory, and I don’t want to do any deep breathing in there, and as I said I’m calm enough now, so I look at myself in the mirror, and then in the stainless steel wall, and then try to picture myself back in the seat near my Marine, and I just want to cry or spit. I’m holding my book and I smack it down on the sink. It’s the size of a brick and slides around once as if oiled. It gets a little wet. I think maybe I’ll just put the lid down on the commode and sit there and read, so I try that, and the light is so bad the words fuzz apart, and I feel a little sick again. A wet book is depressing anyway, and then someone shakes the door.

  Probably I shouldn’t worry because what will happen is I won’t talk with anybody until we touch down and I have to ask someone to help me get my bag.Talking is less and less the culture of airplanes, in any case, with the increasing electronics. Back in the heyday of airplanes, as I remember it, a much larger segment of the population got worked up to plop down next to a stranger; and as long as the stranger wasn’t too ugly, or too smelly, or couldn’t speak enough English, they’d spill it, just swap life stories while others swapped fluids in the lavatory, everyone ships in the night together. But when it comes down to it, I’m just not going to be able to talk to this Marine because the stakes are too high now, and when the stakes are this high there’s no way that if the guy opens his mouth and says anything he can possibly remain a whole human being. Once you fall into a camp, you’re gone, good as dead, and it’s been a long time since I saw anything that didn’t fall into a camp. I can do all kinds of gymnastic contortions around your head but if you believe what I know you believe I’m just going to spaz out by your ear, flicker like a firefly losing its bulb, and keel over like a doornail. This thought is what allows me to slide the latch back
and get on with it.

  Outside, a gathering has accumulated, and a flight attendant is already there shooing people back to their seats, and the speaker announcements are going on about one person at a time and, once again, where the several lavatories are located. I have to go back to back and then belly to belly with one and then more people, dragging my feet, still not knowing what I’ll do; maybe he’ll be sleeping and I can just sit there and get used to his face and what it’s like. But then I get to a row with a huge lady by the window and no one else, so on impulse I sit in the aisle seat and put my nose in my book as if that will make me invisible. I hear the lady making laughing breaths out of her nostrils until I look over. The flesh around her face is vibrating as if she’s angry, but she’s not, it’s just the plane I think, because the vibrating is somehow separate from the swallowed laughter. But who knows? She’s showing me how amused she is with her face and her eyebrows. Then she says, “My husband will be back, in case you’re wondering.” She has a superior voice that creeps me out anyway, so I get up, this time at least with a little hope that there’ll be another spot, and there is—I even pass up a window seat because there’s a person on the aisle and I don’t want to crawl over—so I sit in this next available aisle seat, thinking there can’t be too many people wandering around, it’s a big plane but the flight attendants seem on top of things, and this time the person by the window is a skinny man wearing a shriveled shirt and a fedora, and when I sit down he looks pissed but doesn’t say anything, although he does keep peering at me from under his brim until that creeps me out so much that I close my book and get up again, thinking this is turning into a picaresque minus actual adventure.

  Now, with me standing in the aisle, and I’m the only one in the aisle at the moment that I can see, and I’m looking up the blue river at my near future, elbow after elbow, curved aspects of arm flesh, wisps of hair and clothing, now, in this moment, when I am about to push off, is when the plane starts shaking. It bobs and shakes and then everyone’s signs start plinking and the captain comes on and says about turbulence and air pockets. I stumble forward in the river and catch myself right by my seat, as if by chance, so I just take it, I just take my seat with the hero and sit in it like a spoiled brat, stick my book back behind its elastic band, adjust and readjust my seat belt and then stare at it, thinking of its shiny head like the head of a serpent that’s actually eating and spitting its tail out again in one suspended gulp. The plane rocks. The organs in my body stumble and float.The Marine is awake and stunned. His headphones wobble around his neck in a ring. I lean over for a peek into the aisle and a guy is tossing himself out of the lavatory, trying to hold his pants up and also drag himself along, seat by seat, as the plane bucks.

  I sit back up and a flight attendant wheels by. Carts rattle, and people might be making noise, but somehow I don’t hear them.All I hear are things.The oxygen masks drop, dangle, and the plane is a sudden sea of jellyfish. I think of swimming laps with my eyes open, which I do; when I swim laps at home I keep my wary eyes on the blue lane stripe beneath me as it wiggles in the water. I think of how equidistant I remain from it when I swim, traveling as if at thirty thousand feet in the blue, the snake wiggling like an echo of my swimming body, vibrating and stretching down there, interminably headless and tailless. My book pops out of the seat pocket and slides down the aisle and under the curtain to first class. The Marine paws at his jacket in the seat between us. I take his hand. I just do. “Picture we’re on a roller coaster,” I tell him, and he sits back and nods, setting his face with determination.

  Soon we are in a field of unidentified crops and smoking bits of organic and inorganic debris puff like campfires or small geysers as far as my eye can see. People are sitting around on suitcases like little islands while other people wander, clinging to their seat cushions, looking similar, different, and dazed by the sun, dotting the landscape but clearly in love with the moment, I can tell by the open looks on their faces, because now they know that the seat cushions really do detach, and they know that of all the things that could have happened, one being they died and one being they lived, one of them has already happened, allowing all of us who arrived to arrive in this other moment, when really, we have no idea what will happen next.

  Rich People

  I went to the beach with Jennifer, with her parents and their house. They’re rich. I said, “What’s that?” in the refrigerator, and she said pâté and took out a Coke I think it was and closed the door. Which got me curious, so I waited through three days of meals and snacks for the pâté to come out so I could eat some, and we ate lots of other things, a lot of fish, of course, and hamburgers with potato chips, and eggs, but then it was going to be my last day there and I’d hinted a couple times. We’d be eating something and I’d be sure to say, “Would pâté go with this?” But no pâté. So I snuck down to the kitchen to look at it in the night. On the way I walked very carefully, so that by the time I got down the hall and to the stairs I could kind of tell where the stairs were, and I leaned a lot on the banister in case any of the steps creaked, but either I did a good job or there weren’t any creaks. I got to the living room and edged myself along, touching one cushy chair and then the next, sliding one foot at a time ahead of me. In the kitchen, opening the refrigerator made the bottles in the door rattle. Light gushed onto the floor. I squatted and held the door open with my knee, and I took the pâté out. It was wrapped in cellophane on a little plate with blue flowers. It was the shape of a fat slice of bread and I tried to think of how to eat it.

  I had to move to the counter and the refrigerator door shook closed. I turned on the light under the sink. I took out another small plate. I put the plate of pâté next to the plate. I took a butter knife and trimmed around it, keeping the shape, depositing the slivers of meat onto the other plate, which was white with small blue flowers, like the one from the refrigerator. I ate the slivers, there over the sink, my hands bright, the gray meat faintly, faintly pink in places. When I looked back at the pâté in the light that lit the clean sink I could not believe anyone could look at that piece of loaf and believe it. Jennifer, and her mom and dad, and her brother and his fiancée, and the fiancée’s parents, and a couple guys the two of them knew from college who also lived near them in Manhattan now, all of them sleeping upstairs except for one of the guys who was asleep in the living room on the sofa, which I didn’t know at the time but would know the next morning because he slept through breakfast, almost—all of them, they’d see a country mouse had nibbled at the pâté with a butter knife, all around.

  With a thumping heart I pulled the sliding glass door open to the ocean, and the wave sounds bounded into the house. I ran to the ocean in the romantic night and threw the pâté as far as I could, using the plate to throw it into the dark. The moon was overhead, and the plate was over my head in my hand. Of course there was no splash and I could have tossed the pâté on bare sand for all I knew, but in my panic and shame it was all I’d thought to do.

  It had been delicious. It had been more delicious than William Carlos Williams’s plum. Because it was yours but also because it was complicated.

  I slipped the cellophane into the trash can, beneath other pieces of garbage. I went to bed in the room with Jennifer, with the twin twin beds and matching everything.

  In the rush of people making breakfast I retrieved the two plates and the butter knife from my suitcase and slipped the plates into the sink with the dishes already accumulating. I put the butter knife at my place as I helped Jennifer set the table. “That’s dirty. Get another,” she said. The dishes slid around in the sink with their blue-flowered sisters and cousins. No one mentioned the pâté, which it seems had already disappeared into the history of all the other things the family might or might not have eaten.

  My Favorite Dentist

  You are my favorite dentist.You don’t look on my chart and ask me how my job is. You never duped me into listing my hobbies, not six months ago, and not six months before th
at. You never even tried.You say, “Look at this. Anything new?” and hand me a laminated list of diseases, symptoms, and reasons to be hospitalized. I’m reclining in the sprawling chair and you’re on your wheeled stool beside me. We can both see out the window, where you’ve placed a birdhouse. It’s fall. During my spring appointment I could see the birds fluttering around, framed. This year they were bluebirds. You’re such a grown-up, I think. You never lecture about floss. You say, and it’s a fact, “You should floss more.” Well put. We are all adults here, including your assistant, a pudgy, warm-looking woman with a soft voice.You are your own hygienist.

  There are no Christian magazines in your waiting room. There are no faux-stencil borders on the wallpaper. Six months, cleaning to cleaning. Keeping tabs on my teeth, great leaps of time between. No small talk. I remove my glasses.

  We’re all set up but then your assistant peeks back in and says, “You got a red Toyota? Next door called and you got your lights on.” I slip outside, half blind, in the drizzle, wearing my bib, and switch my lights off. It’s quick. Back in the chair I say, “Thanks. That was so nice of them.” And professional. A little while later in fact someone comes from next door to catch us up on the news. Police are coming closer to nabbing the sniper who’s been terrorizing the suburbs. It’s all so considerate. Even next door they know you listen to the classical station that doesn’t do news.

  But except for dumb me and my lights, we get right to it. Your assistant joins us and sits in a chair in the corner, taking notes on a map of my mouth. You’re keeping an eye on a molar. Something else is at a certain number of millimeters. I appreciate your mask, and how even with it, the one time you cough you turn well away. I appreciate all the latex as well as the repeated raising, lowering, and tilting of the chair. How we cooperate with everything. How all I really have to do is spit.