Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

The captain’s voice on the public address system interrupted Mary Beth’s reverie, telling Mary Beth and the other passengers that a small problem with the onboard computer was “a-okay” and their flight was number one for takeoff. The scheduled time for departure was ten minutes past. Mary Beth bided her time reading the directory of entertainment choices in the back of the magazine, thinking how Burt Lancaster films were never shown on airplanes. She wanted to sit in a cabin full of men in ties, women with hats; she wanted to rack up enough miles to earn platinum status, get upgraded to the front of the cabin, where she’d sit next to a cavalcade of stars, B-grade celebrities. Her brother liked to regale her with stories from his own travels, of run-ins with quasi-famous seatmates: the former Nixon aide who found Jesus in prison, the actor who played the bumbling spy Agent 86, a baseball player most famous for swapping wives with a teammate. Now air travel had all the glamour of a bus ride.

As the plane lumbered to reach V1, the speed required for flight, Mary Beth silently chanted the introduction to a pair of vague prayers, stumbling in the middle passages of both the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary. The words themselves were so familiar that she could not pinpoint her mistake, could not remember when the modern church melded trespasses into debts, only that she relied on prayer at each takeoff and landing to assuage her nerves. There was only the gentle rattle of normal turbulence once the landing gear retracted and the plane began to climb above the Great Basin, out toward the flat expanse of the Great Salt Lake.

TWO PEOPLE thinking simultaneously of the same unsatisfying kiss.

Near the point where the outskirting suburbs of Salt Lake City began to dissolve into high desert, west of the airport, Mike drove fast, fifteen miles per hour over the limit, headed for a rendezvous with a real estate agent who, it turned out, was a cousin of Sherri Ashburton, Mike’s cocktail waitress from the night before. He remembered the name because he’d written it into his log of possible sales leads, made a note to follow up next week. The state seemed filled with these sorts of tangential relations, people who all knew each other, who shared a sense that the land itself was a special place. These small, happy coincidences Mike would take as additional proof that forces he did not understand were pushing him toward Utah as his obvious next stop.

He allowed himself any number of delusions that day: that he had enjoyed a perfect holiday weekend of revelry, that the adventure with Mary Beth that had for so long been on the periphery of his mind as a possibility had just begun. He could persuade her to come to Utah. The kiss had been nothing more than a hurried contingency, a duty she needed to perform before she returned to her son. And he was willing to permit that feeling, for now, the idea that he did not have to be first among all her obligations. It would be only a few hours before he would realize exactly how wrong he was. Nothing in his life could prepare him. He had built an entire miniature empire on anticipating every contingency for each prospect, and soon he’d be confronted with proof that it was a skill he could not use for his own benefit. That’s what would burn in him, the knowledge that she’d been saying good-bye the entire time. Mike could not anticipate how, in just a few more hours, he would end up dazzled and beaten, remembering how Mary Beth had given him a kiss at curbside, that solitary benediction placed on the forehead, as if she were purposefully avoiding the contradictions and intimacies that came with open mouths, choosing instead to give him this promise in the form of a kiss Mike Renfro would always consider to be filled with meaning because of its felicity, its grace, its finality.

And now, as her flight barreled above the Utah flats, headed to its cruising altitude of thirty-seven thousand feet, Mary Beth fixated on the kiss because it had been so perfunctory and meaningless. How often in her life she had wanted more: more passion, more commitment, more of a sense of destiny. Her college girlfriends used to debate what was worse, a life without passion or a life without security; what she had learned in the intervening two decades was that you could have an abundance of either one, but if the other was lacking, you were still basically bankrupt. She’d allowed herself the luxury of pretending her getaway had been a romantic vacation, which came with the luxury of looking forward. Mike was the eternal optimist; it came with his profession. He was always on the debit. She could hear him saying, No prospect was ever truly lost, which meant he would never see her departure in the same concrete terms as she was beginning to, the start of one era, the end of another. That’s what her kiss with Mike had been, a dividing line. She’d felt in her body and in the purse of her lips a kiss that felt defensive, one of custom and obligation, erected as a stop sign, chaste, motherly, and final.

PEOPLE MILLED together at the New Year’s Day party with the randomness of charged particles. Sarah Hensley didn’t even use the word party. Instead she welcomed guests by recounting how Mike Renfro, the owner of the house, had given her his blessing: Why don’t you just stay at the house? Have a few friends over, watch the Rose Bowl on the big screen. Sarah and her friends planned on taking full advantage of both Mike’s hospitality and his absence. Already, his sterile, modern kitchen was sullied with huddles of empty beers; ashtrays overflowed with Soviet-colored muck; three-quarter-empty cocktails were riddled with wounded slivers of citrus and dissolving cigarettes.

Sarah Hensley’s only official duty on New Year’s Day was to keep an eye on her coworker’s kid. After spending two-thirds of the weekend trying to decipher the whims of a six-year-old, Sarah figured that today Gabriel Blumenthal could entertain his own damn self.

He sat in the midst of forty meandering guests, petulantly reminding them to step over the cadre of stuffed bears he had nestled among the ancient, comfortable blankets piled on the floor of the great room. No one paid him much attention. On the concrete patio that abutted the great room, Sarah’s friends sunned themselves, sleeping the dulcet sleep that came from too many margaritas in the early-afternoon sun of a freakishly warm January day. The poolside stereo churned out power-chord and hair-extension rock music ten years out of vogue, Sarah’s guilty and ironic pleasure.

Another dozen people reclined inside on a passel of leather couches, staring up at the final minute of a lopsided bowl game. Between plays, the director cut away to a shot of the announcers in the booth eating Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Down on the field, two linemen hoisted a coach onto their shoulders before their other teammates could douse him with the Gatorade bucket. Which meant that what the linemen had intended as a Gatorade shower for the coach instead became an avalanche of sticky ice poured down his butt and over their teammates’ heads. As the color commentator drew up the error on the Telestrator, he laughed and said, “What did you expect? They’re big, dumb oxes, these linemen, every one of them. I should know. I played nose guard in college.”

Like half the other women at the party, Sarah wore a swimsuit. Hers was a demure navy-blue bikini, and over that, she wrapped a flirty white terrycloth robe that fell open at midthigh. In between bouts of hot-tub frolicking, she elbowed her way through clusters of friends to retrieve a beer and found herself leaning over a small, mirrored tray striped with parallel lines of cocaine. Sarah considered her own reflection—a hint of wind and sun, her nostrils appended with a five-dollar bill—then looked around the house to ensure Gabriel was not watching before hoovering up two quick bumps of someone else’s blow.