When You Are Engulfed in Flames

by David Sedaris

  As the summer progressed, so did the mysteries. Spiders relocated, both male and female, and I started noticing a lot of spare parts — a forsaken leg or palp lying in a web that used to belong to Paula or Philip or the Right Reverend Karen. Someone new would move in, and as soon as I tacked up a fresh name card, he or she would vacate without notice. What had once seemed like a fine neighborhood quickly became a dangerous one, the tenants all thuggish and transitory. Maybe April was more highly respected than anyone else in her window unit. Maybe her enemies knew that she was being watched, but, for whatever reason, she was one of the few Tegenaria that managed to stay put and survive. In mid-September, Hugh and I returned to the city and, at the last minute, I bought a plastic terrarium and decided to take her with me. The “April in Paris” business didn’t occur to me until we were on the train, and I held her container against the window, saying, “Look, the Eiffel Tower!”

  Funny, the details that slip your notice until it’s too late. The fact, for instance, that we don’t really have flies in Paris, at least not in our apartment. Back in Normandy, catching prey had been a breeze. I could do it barefoot and in my pajamas, but now I was forced to go outside and lurk around the trash cans in the Luxembourg Gardens. Someone would toss in a disposable diaper, and I’d stand a few feet from the bin and wait for the scent to be picked up. Then there’d be the sneak attack, the clattering jar, the little spell of cursing and foot stomping. Had the flies been gathered on a windowpane, I would have enjoyed the last laugh, but out in the open, and with an audience of French people noting my every failure, my beautiful hobby became a chore.

  I’d been telling myself for months that April needed me — though of course she didn’t. An adequate amount of prey stumbled into her web, and she caught it quite capably on her own — that was the case in Normandy anyway. Now, though, trapped inside a terrarium in a fourth-floor apartment, she honestly did need me, and the responsibility weighed a ton. Tegenaria can go without eating for three months, but whenever I returned home empty-handed, I could feel her little spider judgment seeping from the plastic box. The face that had once seemed goofy was now haughty and expectant. “Hmm,” I imagined her saying. “I guess I had you figured all wrong.”

  In early October the weather turned cool. Then the rains came and, overnight, every fly in Paris packed up and left town. April hadn’t eaten in over a week when, just by chance, I happened upon a pet store and learned that it sold live crickets, blunt little black ones that looked like bolts with legs. I bought a chirping boxful and felt very proud of myself until the next morning, when I learned something no nature show ever told me: crickets stink. They reek. Rather than dirty diapers or spoiled meat, something definite you can put your finger on, they smell like an inclination: cruelty maybe, or hatred.

  No amount of incense or air freshener could diminish the stench. Any attempt only made it worse, and it was this more than anything that led me back to Normandy. April and I took the train in late October, and I released her into her old home. I guess I thought that she would move back in, but in our absence her web had fallen to ruin. One corner had come unmoored, and its ragged, fly-speckled edge drooped like a filthy petticoat onto the window ledge. “I’m pretty sure it can be fixed,” I told her, but before I could elaborate, or even say good-bye, she took off running. And I never saw her again.

  There have been other Tegenaria over the years, a new population every summer, and though I still feed them and monitor their comings and goings, it’s with a growing but not unpleasant distance, an understanding that, unlike mammals, spiders do only what they’re supposed to do. Whatever drives the likes of April is private and severe, and my attempts to humanize it only moved me further from its majesty. I still can’t resist the fly catching, but in terms of naming and relocating I’ve backed off considerably, though Hugh would say not enough.

  I suppose there’s a place in everyone’s heart that’s reserved for another species. My own is covered in cobwebs rather than dog or cat hair, and, because of this, people assume it doesn’t exist. It does, though, and I felt it ache when Katrina hit. The TV was on, the grandmother signaled from her rooftop, and I found myself wondering, with something akin to panic, if there were any spiders in her house.

  Crybaby

  The night flight to Paris leaves JFK at 7:00 p.m. and arrives at de Gaulle the next day at about 8:45 a.m. French time. Between takeoff and landing, there’s a brief parody of an evening: dinner is served, the trays are cleared, and four hours later it’s time for breakfast. The idea is to trick the body into believing it has passed a night like any other — that your unsatisfying little nap was actually sleep and now you are rested and deserving of an omelet.

  Hoping to make the lie more convincing, many passengers prepare for bed. I’ll watch them line up outside the bathroom, some holding toothbrushes, some dressed in slippers or loose-fitting pajama-type outfits. Their slow-footed padding gives the cabin the feel of a hospital ward: the dark aisles are corridors; the flight attendants are nurses. The hospital feeling grows even stronger once you leave coach. Up front, where the seats recline almost flat, like beds, the doted-on passengers lie under their blankets and moan. I’ve heard, in fact, that the airline staff often refers to the business-class section as “the ICU,” because the people there demand such constant attention. They want what their superiors are getting in first class, so they complain incessantly, hoping to get bumped up.

  There are only two classes on the airline I normally take between France and the United States — coach and something called Business Elite. The first time I sat there, I was flown to America and back for a book tour. “Really,” I kept insisting, “there’s no need.” The whole “first-to-board” business, I found a little embarrassing, but then they brought me a bowl of warm nuts and I began to soften. The pampering takes some getting used to. A flight attendant addresses me as “Mr. Sedaris,” and I feel sorry that she’s forced to memorize my name rather than, say, her granddaughter’s cell phone number. On this particular airline, though, they do it in such a way that it seems perfectly natural, or at least it does after a time.

  “May I bring you a drink to go with those warm nuts, Mr. Sedaris?” the woman looking after me asked — this as the people in coach were still boarding. The looks they gave me as they passed were the looks I give when the door of a limousine opens. You always expect to see a movie star, or, at the very least, someone better dressed than you, but time and time again it’s just a sloppy nobody. Thus the look, which translates to, Fuck you, Sloppy Nobody, for making me turn my head.

  On all my subsequent flights, the Business Elite section was a solid unit, but on this particular plane it was divided in two: four rows up front and two in the back. The flight attendant assured everyone in my section that although we were technically in the back, we shouldn’t think of it as the back. We had the same rights and privileges as those passengers ahead of us. Yet still they were ahead of us, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d been somehow favored.

  On the way to New York, I sat beside a bearded Frenchman, who popped a pill shortly after takeoff and was out until we landed. On the leg back there was no one beside me, at least not for the first half hour. Then a flight attendant knelt in the aisle beside my seat and asked if I might do her a favor. That’s how they talk in Business Elite. “I’m wondering, Mr. Sedaris, if you might do me a favor?”

  Chipmunk-like, my cheeks packed with warm nuts, I cocked my head.

  “I’ve got a passenger a few rows up, and his crying is disturbing the people around him. Do you think it would be OK if he sat here?”

  The woman was blond and heavily made-up. Glasses hung from a chain around her neck, and as she gestured to the empty window seat beside me, I got a pleasant whiff of what smelled like oatmeal cookies. “I believe he’s Polish,” she whispered. “That is to say, I think he’s from Poland. The country.”

  “Is he a child?” I asked, and the flight attendant told me no.

&
nbsp; “Is he drunk?”

  Again she said no. “His mother just died, and he’s on his way to her funeral.”

  “So people are upset because he’s crying over his dead mother?”

  “That’s the situation,” she told me.

  I’d once read that a first-class passenger complained — threatened to sue, if I remember correctly — because the blind person next to him was traveling with a Seeing Eye dog. He wasn’t allergic, this guy. Labrador retrievers on the street didn’t bother him, but he hadn’t paid thousands of dollars to sit next to one, or at least that was his argument. If that had seemed the last word in assholiness, this was a close second.

  I said of course the man could sit beside me, and the flight attendant disappeared into the darkness, returning a few minutes later with the grieving passenger.

  “Thank you,” she mouthed.

  And I said, “No problem.”

  The Polish man might have been in his midforties but seemed older, just as people in my parents’ generation had. Foreign blood, or an abundance of responsibility, had robbed him of the prolonged adolescence currently enjoyed by Americans of the same age, so his face, though unlined, seemed older than mine, more used. His eyes were red and swollen from crying, and his nose, which was large and many-faceted, looked as if it had been roughly carved from wood and not yet sanded smooth. In the dim light, he resembled one of those elaborate, handcrafted bottle stoppers — the kindly peasant or good-natured drunk who tips his hat when you pull the string. After settling in, the man looked out the darkened window. Then he bit his lower lip, covered his face with his remarkably large hands, and proceeded to sob, deeply. I felt that I should say something, but what? And how? Perhaps it would be better, less embarrassing for him, if I were to pretend that he wasn’t crying — to ignore him, basically. And so I did.

  The Polish man didn’t want dinner, just waved it away with those king-sized mitts of his, but I could feel him watching as I cut into my herb-encrusted chicken, most likely wondering how anyone could carry on at a time like this. That’s how I felt when my mother died. The funeral took place on a Saturday afternoon in November. It was unseasonably warm that day, even for Raleigh, and returning from the church we passed people working on their lawns as if nothing had happened. One guy even had his shirt off. “Can you beat that?” I said to my sister Lisa, not thinking of all the funeral processions that had passed me over the years — me laughing, me throwing stones at signs, me trying to stand on my bicycle seat. Now here I was eating, and it wasn’t bad, either. The best thing about this particular airline is the after-dinner sundae. The vanilla ice cream is in the bowl already, but you can choose from any number of toppings. I order the caramel and chopped nuts, and the flight attendant spoons them on before my eyes. “Is that enough sauce, Mr. Sedaris?” she’ll ask, and, “Are you sure you don’t want whipped cream?” It would be years before I worked up the courage to ask for seconds, and when I finally did I felt like such a dope. “Do you think, um . . . I mean, is it possible to have another one of those?”

  “Well, of course it is, Mr. Sedaris! Have a third if you like!”

  That’s Business Elite for you. Spend eight thousand dollars on a ticket, and if you want an extra thirteen cents’ worth of ice cream, all you have to do is ask. It’s like buying a golf cart and having a few tees thrown in, but still it works. “Golly,” I say. “Thanks!”

  In the years before I asked for seconds, my sundae would be savored — each crumb of cashew or walnut eaten separately, the way a bird might. After those were gone, I would recline a bit and start in on the caramel. By the time the ice cream itself was finished, I’d be stretched out flat, watching a movie on my private screen. The control panels for the seats are located on a shared armrest, and it would take me a good three or four flights before I got the hang of them. On this trip, for instance, I kept mashing the buttons, wondering why they failed to work: feet up, feet down, head back, head forward. I was two seconds from calling the flight attendant when I looked to my right and saw the Polish man keening and bucking against his will. It was then that I realized I had the wrong control panel. “Sorry about that,” I said. And he held up his pan-sized hand, the way you do when you mean “No hard feelings.”

  When my empty bowl was taken away, I leafed through the in-flight magazine, biding my time until my neighbor’s dizziness wore off and he could fall asleep. In an effort to appear respectful, I’d already missed the first movie cycle, but I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out. Up ahead, in the cheerful part of Business Elite, someone laughed. It wasn’t the practiced chuckle you offer in response to a joke, but something more genuine, a bark almost. It’s the noise one makes when watching stupid movies on a plane, movies you’d probably never laugh at in the theater. I think it’s the thinness of the air that weakens your resistance. A pilot will offer some shopworn joke, and even the seasoned fliers will bust a gut. The only funny announcement I’ve ever heard was made by a male flight attendant, a queen, who grabbed the microphone as we were taxiing down the runway in San Francisco. “Those of you standing in the aisles should have an excellent view of the Fasten Seat Belt sign,” he said.

  My memory of him and his stern, matronly voice was interrupted by my seatmate, who seemed to have suffered a setback. The man was crying again, not loudly but steadily, and I wondered, perhaps unfairly, if he wasn’t overdoing it a bit. Stealing a glance at his blocky, tearstained profile, I thought back to when I was fifteen and a girl in my junior high died of leukemia, or “Love Story disease,” as it was often referred to then. The principal made the announcement, and I, along with the rest of my friends, fell into a great show of mourning. Group hugs, bouquets laid near the flagpole. I can’t imagine what it would have been like had we actually known her. Not to brag, but I think I took it hardest of all. “Why her and not me?” I wailed.

  “Funny,” my mother would say, “but I don’t remember you ever mentioning anyone named Monica.”

  My friends were a lot more understanding, especially Barbara, who, a week after the funeral, announced that maybe she would kill herself as well.

  None of us reminded her that Monica had died of a terminal illness, as, in a way, that didn’t matter anymore. The point was that she was gone, and our lives would never be the same: we were people who knew people who died. This is to say that we had been touched by tragedy, and had been made special by it. By all appearances, I was devastated, but in fact I had never felt so purposeful and fulfilled.

  The next time someone died, it was a true friend, a young woman named Dana who was hit by a car during our first year of college. My grief was genuine, yet still, no matter how hard I fought, there was an element of showmanship to it, the hope that someone might say, “You look like you just lost your best friend.”

  Then I could say, “As a matter of fact, I did,” my voice cracked and anguished.

  It was as if I’d learned to grieve by watching television: here you cry, here you throw yourself upon the bed, here you stare into the mirror and notice how good you look with a tear-drenched face.

  Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am. This Polish man for instance. Given the time it would take him to buy a ticket and get to JFK, his mother would have been dead for at least six hours, maybe longer. Wasn’t he over it yet? I mean, really, who were these tears for? It was as if he were saying, “I loved my mother a lot more than you loved yours.” No wonder his former seatmate had complained. The guy was so competitive, so self-righteous, so, well, over the top.

  Another bark of laughter from a few rows up, and it occurred to me that perhaps my sympathy was misplaced. Perhaps these tears of his were the by-product of guilt rather than sorrow. I envisioned a pale, potato-nosed woman, a tube leaking fluids into her arm. Calls were placed, expensive ones, to her only son in the United States. “Come quick,” she said, but he was too caught up in his own life. Such a hectic time. So many things to do. His wife was getting h
er stripper’s license. He’d been asked to speak at his son’s parole board hearing. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll come at the end of dog racing season.” And then . . . this. She rides to her death on a lumpy gurney, and he flies to her funeral in Business Elite. The man killed his mother with neglect, and because of that I can’t watch a movie on a plane?

  I pulled my private screen from its hiding place in my armrest and had just slipped on my headphones when the flight attendant came by. “Are you sure I can’t get you something to eat, Mr. . . . ?” She looked down at her clipboard and made a sound like she was gargling with stones.

  The Polish man shook his head no, and she regarded me with disappointment, as if it had been my job to stoke his appetite. I thought you were different, her eyes seemed to say.

  I wanted to point out that at least I hadn’t complained. I hadn’t disrespected his grief by activating my screen, either, but I did once she’d retreated back into the darkness. Of the four movies playing, I had already seen three. The other was called Down to Earth and starred Chris Rock as an aspiring stand-up comic. One day he gets hit and killed by a truck and, after a short spell in Heaven, he’s sent back among the living in the body of an elderly white man. The reviews had been tepid at best, but I swear I’ve never seen anything funnier. I tried not to laugh, I really did, but that’s a losing game if ever there was one. This I learned when I was growing up. I don’t know why it was, exactly, but nothing irritated my father quite like the sound of his children’s happiness. Group crying he could stand, but group laughter was asking for it, especially at the dinner table.