James Collins - Love In The Air

Peter stared out the window: a truck was pumping fuel into the plane’s belly through a thick, umbilical hose. Peter was a happy fellow, basically. He was in his early twenties and he was good-looking, with an open face and light brown eyes and fine brown hair that flopped over his forehead; he stood a shade under six feet and had a strong, medium-sized frame. He liked his job, basically, and he was doing well; he had friends; he was a decent athlete; he had had a relatively happy childhood. But this love business—so far, it had not been very satisfying. He had been involved with girls he liked; he had been involved with girls he didn’t like. In neither case had he ever really felt … whatever it was that he imagined he was supposed to feel. He was shy, so that even though he showed determination at work, and playing hockey he positively enjoyed giving an opponent a hard check, he shrank before a girl who attracted him, and this made the search for someone who would make him feel whatever it was he was supposed to feel particularly difficult. Moreover, he wasn’t cold-blooded, so he couldn’t pursue and abandon girls with the same relish as some of his friends, his best friend in particular; rather, he had a sympathetic streak that, in the matter of making conquests, seemed much more like a weakness than a strength.

Peter watched a crewman begin to uncouple the fuel hose. Then he felt a Presence. It was a female, he sensed. Could this be the very one, could this be She? He turned his head and did see a woman. A woman who was perhaps seventy years old wearing a black wig. In place of eyebrows she had two arched pencil lines, and she had applied a large clown’s oval of red lipstick to her mouth. Peter’s eyes met hers. Her false eyelashes reminded him of tarantula legs. My darling!

“What row is this?” the woman asked him. Peter told her. She looked at her boarding pass and threw her hands up. “Ach,” she said, “my row doesn’t exist. There is no such row. It’s a row they tell you about for a joke. They skipped it. I have the plane where they skip rows. If my son would visit me, I would avoid this aggravation. But no. The wife—the wife gets dehydrated on the plane. Dehydrated, you know—water?” She looked hard at Peter. “Are you married?” she asked. He shook his head. “Marry a nice girl.” She paused a moment to make sure this advice sank in and then turned around and headed back toward the front of the plane.

Peter could see no other passengers in the aisle. A flight attendant strode by closing luggage bins. Peter listened to the engines. Any minute now the plane would begin to pull away from the gate and the monitors drooping from the ceiling would begin to play the safety video. Peter looked at the empty seat beside him. His earlier agitation and euphoria had dissipated, replaced by a hangover of irrational disappointment. He looked at the seat belt, two lifeless arms embracing no one. Of course, all that could be inferred from absence was absence. He now knew who would sit beside him: nobody.

Peter sighed and shrugged his shoulders. Then, like a depressive pulling the covers over his head, he spread open his paper so that it surrounded him and began to read a story with the headline “Council Rebuffs Mayor on Wake-Zones Measure.” It was quite interesting, actually. There was an effort to slow watercraft to prevent damage to shoreline structures. Like Venice. Peter had been reading for a couple of minutes when he heard some rushed footsteps coming toward him, the light, tripping footsteps, he noted, of a young person, most likely a female young person. Then, when they had seemed to reach his row, the footsteps stopped. Peter became aware of a form hovering nearby. But because of his newspaper, he couldn’t see who it was. He nonchalantly folded the paper back, glanced to his right, and saw that a young woman was hoisting a bag overhead. As she lifted her arms, she revealed a tanned, well-modeled stripe of abdomen. Peter’s heart fluttered. He concentrated on his paper. “In New South, Courthouse Towns See Change, Continuity.”

The young woman sat down. As well as he could, while pretending to idly look around the cabin, Peter studied her. She appeared to be Peter’s age, and she had long reddish blond hair that fell over her shoulders. She wore a thin, white cardigan and blue jeans. What Peter first noticed in her profile was the soft bow of her jaw and how the line turned back at her rounded chin. It reminded Peter of an ideal curve that might be displayed in an old painting manual. His eye traveled back along the jaw, returning to the girl’s ear. It was a small ear, beige in color, that appeared almost edible, like a biscuit. Her straight nose had a finely tooled knob at the end, and her forehead rose like the side of an overturned bowl; her complexion was as smooth and warm-toned as honey. As to her form, she was lanky, with long legs and arms and thin wrists. Her long neck held her head aloft.

Now the young woman turned in Peter’s direction, looking for the clasp on her seat belt. The trapezoid created by her shoulders and her narrow waist, the roundness of her bosom, the working of her fingers, so long they seemed like individual limbs, all moved him deeply. Then she raised her head, looked at him, and smiled. The effect was like seeing the sun over the ocean at midmorning, a tremendous blast of light. It was as if the young woman had raised some mythic golden shield whose brilliance would prostrate the armies of the Hittites. She had an oval face, and her large eyes were set wide apart; they were green, as green as a green flame! Peter instructed the muscles at the corners of his mouth to retract in a friendly way, with a hint of flirtatiousness. He imagined the result was like the grimace of someone breathing mustard gas. The girl nodded and looked away, buckling her seat belt and settling herself in.

Before she sat down, Peter noticed, she had thrown a thick paperback onto her seat. He hadn’t been able to see the title. Now she opened it and began to read. In her left hand she held back a thick wedge of pages, about two thirds of the book. After a moment, Peter saw out of the corner of his eye that she had let go with her left hand and the book had fallen closed. She sat staring before her, lost in thought. Peter saw the book’s cover and was taken aback: The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann.

To sit next to a beautiful young woman on a flight from New York to Los Angeles is one thing. To sit next to a beautiful young woman on a flight from New York to Los Angeles who is on page five hundred of The Magic Mountain is quite another. If you look over to see what the beautiful young woman next to you is reading, and it turns out to be a book about angels, then you can with perfect justification refuse her entry into your life. What could you possibly have to say to each other? The same logic applies even if the book is more respectable, but basically dumb—a harrowing but ultimately life-affirming memoir. And if the book is utterly respectable but still basically dumb, say the new book by a fashionable, overrated English novelist, then the young woman is especially dismissible, since the worst alternative possible is talking to someone who thinks she is clever but isn’t. At the same time, if she were reading something that showed that she really was extremely smart—a computer-science journal—then there would be no point in talking to her either: she would be far too intimidating. In sum, an argument could be derived from virtually any reading matter that would allow a young man—scared out of his wits—to persuade himself that it was perfectly sensible, rather than the height of cowardice, to ignore the beautiful young woman who would be sitting next to him for the following five hours. Any reading matter, that is, except The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. A beautiful young woman reading The Magic Mountain —how could he weasel out of this challenge? It was a serious book, but not one suited to a preening intellectual, who would prefer one that was more difficult and less stodgy. A young woman reading The Magic Mountain had to be intelligent and patient and interested in a range of different ideas, many of them quite old-fashioned. She would also happen to be reading the only long German novel that Peter Russell himself had ever read.