Slowly she took the window. I joined her in the aisle, burying the drinks booklet deep into the seatback pocket. And then suddenly I noticed she was smiling. “Ohhh,” she said, looking around at the scuffed walls, the ancient fonts on the emergency instructions. An explanation was finally dawning on her. “So this plane doesn’t land in our city.”
Right now the TV is playing a Canadian Football game, which you get up here in middle Michigan, and I’m lying on top of the comforter, working down a Sierra Mist on ice from the hall machine. I still drink my drinks like they’re drinks. It’s my one concession to the rhythm of my old addiction. I just got so expert at that first fat slurp, the grimace and sigh. It seems a shame to give something like that up, once you’ve grown that good at it. I can’t afford to throw away the skills I have left. I still lie on top of comforters, too. No self-respecting frequent flier is supposed to even keep it on the bed, but I figure with where I am now, a few jiggers of bacteria aren’t going to change my situation appreciably. Anyway, who said I was a self-respecting flier?
I went down to the lobby a little while ago, for the Wi-Fi connection. I deliberately send emails at 9:00 p.m. now, always bcc’ing my boss. I spike them with attentive details about the time and place, lace them with invitations to breakfast meetings. Then I check them over three times, petrified of typos. I worry I am one “teh,” one late-night “adn” away from another downgrade in product, and the next level fits in no roller suitcase. One lucky thing about these terrible hotels is that they usually don’t have bars, or thick walls, but this one has both. And I needed to prime some leads. I needed to get them wondering about the bag.
So I plodded downstairs, quickly tethering myself to the charging station near the front desk. I started out well, just focused on putting one letter in front of another. I referenced the brand of bath products carried in my own hotel’s shower. I found an excuse to add some specifics about the Continental spread. What praise I lavished on these woody croissants. But after about fifteen minutes, my eyes started to drift over to the little bar. It’s really more of a barrette, tucked behind the elevators, but even the flimsiest hotel pub is a wonder of diversity. It’s something you crave when you’re exiled to the suburbia of teetotaling. All those liqueurs, in their emerald and sapphire bottles, from all those nations. It’s a kind of traveling itself.
There was a single drinker there, throwing himself at a chalice of something beige. Every thirty seconds or so he would tilt his head back and crunch a mouthful of ice. The sound cracked around the bare lobby. I could forgive the color of the drink, I thought. But there is no noise like teeth on wet bar ice. I loathe it. That ice has been put there to cool your spirit, a noble purpose. You have been supplied peanuts to crunch. Leave the ice to its work.
Really, if he’d just been drinking a better drink better, I would have been fine. I would have put my head down and dug back into the wonders of spellcheck. But he was drinking like a hack. I made eye contact with the bartender. I rolled my eyes, and she rolled them back, and that hadn’t happened in a while. And before I knew what I was doing, I was rising from my seat to call for Bombay and demonstrate to him how it was done.
Thank God for this rotten company laptop. This old warhorse I have cursed so many times. Made of obsolete metals. Too wide for the tray table in an exit row, not graced with a magnetic plug to disengage if your foot kicks the cord. I took two steps toward the bar—and the blessed thing laid me flat on the linoleum.
I looked up to see the front desk clerk and the bartender gazing down at me. The White Russian and its drinker had disappeared. The laptop was wobbling up and down at the edge of the desk, nodding contentedly in my direction.
“OK, no more for you,” the bartender said with a wink. She helped me up with soft hands.
As soon as I got back upstairs, I staggered into the bathroom and swept all the conditioners off the vanity, stuffing them into the fridge. Then I spilled a gush of soda into this glass. I propped myself up on the bed and forced myself to slow down. And I began sipping it the old way, the way it was meant to be sipped. And even though nothing but sugar was flowing, I started to feel better. I started to feel like myself again. When my wife said she was done, and I wasn’t ready to be done, what I really wasn’t ready to give up was being an expert at something. It’s just like the airplanes. You can keep your leather seats, your acres of legroom. I don’t miss the luxury. I miss the mastery.
It’s getting late now. It’s my last night at this hotel. I’ve retrieved a new pack of ice from down the hall and am pressing it against my face. Tomorrow I take my next hop-skip, a connector from here in Kalamazoo down to Kentucky, via somewhere somewhat in between. As with too many trips lately, my sales on this jaunt have not gone well. I’ve got only the morning to make back the cost of the flights, and so far my lead in Battle Creek hasn’t let me open the case. I can’t even get them to muse on what’s inside. The truth is, even I sometimes forget. I’ll be eight slides in and it will occur to me: I have zero memory of what I’m selling. And this helps. It’s useful that I can’t remember. Good for my soul and good for my sell. My pitch now is based on curiosity alone—the fact that when you don’t know what’s in a bag, you want someone to open it. And when I can’t recall, I can channel my own curiosity. “Hmm, wonder what’s in here . . .” They can’t imagine I’m being sincere. “Feel it,” I say. “Heavy.” They are duly impressed. I carry it around all day. Who would do that if it weren’t something good? Who could respect himself? Finally, I drop the punch line: “And it doesn’t even fit in the overhead.”
I am pitching them on my own pain, and it is moderately effective. Just enough to make the pain sustainable. But the limitations are obvious. The sheer weight of a bag can only take you so far. This afternoon I watched them glaze over as I gave my pitch, sipping on coffee that wasn’t there. Believe me, I wanted to tell them: I know what a sip is and what a sip isn’t. “How’s the coffee?” I asked. “What if I told you that what’s in this case is better than coffee?” They didn’t wonder what then. I massaged my aching shoulders where the strap digs in. They didn’t ask what was wrong. This is my test of their attention. The bag rolls. So I pretended I was having a problem with my PowerPoint and cut the thing short. I can’t afford to spend my material when there’s no chance, to use myself up. I can only beg for curiosity so many times before I get fed up and spill the beans. I still long to make the elegant promises I used to, with my old product. I can’t offer them that easiest thing of all to sell, so much more marketable than a worse version of me, which is a better version of them.
So tomorrow morning I get to start again, from the beginning. To struggle my way back into that room, scan my surroundings for other things my bag could be. Maybe the bruise from my fall will help. Pulling away the ice pack, I can see that it’s already starting to turn an interesting purple. It could give me a whole new story.
My hopes may not be what you’d call sky-high. But then I will walk out of that room, and I will get a second chance. Because then it’s back to the airport. And once I get back to the airport, there is always a possibility. Because some days, I’ll slouch into the terminal, thinking about nothing more than what dinner foods I’ll be eating for breakfast, what sorry yogurt I’ll be packing up for dinner. I’ll gaze doubtfully up at the board, already taking my clothes off for security, not bothering to remove my belt, because I no longer bother to wear one. And then I’ll notice that it’s a proper gate listed up there. Vitamin gates, we used to call them: B6, B12, C. And I’ll suddenly find out that my puddle jumper has been replaced by a sleek 757, a sturdy A320—even, every once in a great while, a big, beaming 767, like the kind I used to take. Forget the Bs, this one is flying out of A1: steak sauce, we used to call it. They’ll have tacked a leg onto the beginning of a transatlantic flight, and I’ll have the sublime experience of flying from, say, Charlotte to Philadelphia on a grand double-aisle. I will share in the beginning of some plane’s long trip. I’ll briefly be a
part of something big. Entire families will be around me, not split up, in fact barely making a dent in their row. And somehow that will be all it takes to pull me back. As I stride out of the airport and hail a car to my client, I’ll get a glint in my eye that even I can see. And on those days I know I’ll be leaving my heavy bag behind.
About the Author
THEO SCHELL-LAMBERT is a writer based in New Orleans. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Village Voice, the Believer, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. His debut novel will be published by Little A in the spring.
Theo on Writing
Small Bottles
John McPhee. McPhee is my favorite New Yorker writer. He handles hard data and technical information in a way that makes them fascinating. (Making anything fascinating is kind of a mandate of the New Yorker, but it’s McPhee who takes it to hard geology and transportation systems.) Why are rocks boring in someone else’s hands, but not McPhee’s? The best I can figure is that (1) he pretends they’re not boring, and (2) he writes about them with a kind of language of love. Be specific enough about anything, and art will be revealed. When I had the protagonist dig into his obsession with different airplane configurations, I was thinking about McPhee.
The McDonnell Douglas MD-80. This story started with its first two sentences, which came to me on a flight between Denver and Santa Ana. The plane I was sitting on was similar to the current standard-issue 737s and Airbus 319s, except it had only two seats on one side, which I believe was more common in the previous generation of midsize airliners. The card said it was an MD-80. Well, so what? Modern airline travel is pitched as this kind of identical experience—you’re supposed to have the same trip every time, and in some sense you usually do. But it struck me that there’s also this other layer of the story, in which every plane is different, and the little differences between aircraft matter. Essentially my thought was flights are predicated on travelers tuning out the details, and what if a frequent traveler became completely tuned into them? What if someone paid attention?
The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald. This is probably the least trackable influence on this list, but reading Sebald has strongly affected the way I think about characters in the context of their little historical moment. This story is in large part about time, about humans and technology both aging at slightly different paces, about feeling detached from the modern world while living amid its hardest quotidian details. We are now owned by the random arrangement of the outlets in the airport terminal. Who even picked where they’d be placed? Sebald is also, like Nabokov, great at writing about people in motion: on trains, on rambles, on pilgrimages.
Mary Karr and Rosie Schaap. Writing about drinking is tricky. Its cool and its banality both need to be acknowledged. Drinking one martini at a hotel bar is one thing; drinking two gins at a motel minibar another. For me, the poet and memoirist Mary Karr is a writer who’s managed to capture both the élan and clumsiness of booze. Rosie Schaap, the drink columnist for the New York Times Magazine, also writes terrifically about drinking culture and what of it has merit—the camaraderie in bars is genuinely noble, I think—and what is ugly. I wanted to make sure my protagonist missed some genuinely good things about something that was inarguably bad—that he’d lost something valid, too. That tension interested me.
Hats by the Blue Nile, and Paracosm by Washed Out. A lot of writers write about how they can’t write to music, especially music with words. I don’t feel that way. (I do a lot of writing in coffee shops, and I think the process of actively tuning out words—while absorbing a tone—is productive for me.) But I do need to listen to the same one or two albums for the entirety of a piece: no switching once I’m in. I wrote the first draft of this story while listening to Scottish band the Blue Nile; their atmospherics felt suited to airplanes and airports. I revised it while playing Paracosm to death—another atmospheric, spacious album, but with the emotions a bit closer to the surface, which is usually what you want out of a revision.
Maryanna Hoggatt © 2014
LA SEPOLTURA
* * *
KHALIAH WILLIAMS
It’s past three in the morning and, save the bakers just starting to push around newly made dough on their worktables, and the tourists spilling out of nightclubs holding the hands of locals—drunk, sweaty, and hazy in love, the city’s working population is sleeping. I am awake, standing in my kitchen, shivering from the winter draft that has crept into the apartment. I stirred from my sleep because our phone is ringing. When I answer, I find my mother on the other end of the line. She tells me that my father is dead, and asks if I could please do the right thing and come home. And though I hardly knew him, I agree to board a plane and return to the United States. I am twenty-four years old, living in Florence, Italy, and no more fatherless than I was when I went to bed four hours before.
In the morning, Nini, my husband, asks who called in the middle of the night. “Tua mamma?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “My father is dead. I need to go back to the United States.”
“Ma non lo conoscevi.” You didn’t even know him, he reminds me. He is calculating the cost of a last-minute ticket to the States.
“I need to go. My mother has asked me.”
“Tesoro, non posso—”
“Don’t worry. I know you’re busy. I should go alone anyway. You’ll come home with me another time,” I tell him. It’s a lie, but it’s the polite thing to say, and if we are anything to each other, we are polite. I pull the largest suitcase we own from the hall closet and pack for Philadelphia in February.
Just before we were married, I explained to Nini (as best I could) that my father had left when I was five. This was not what Nini wanted to hear at the beginning of our affair, spent mostly in bed. He was interested in a different kind of America. Not the one where men leave behind their children and wives. He wanted stories about my childish impulses and teenage brushes with love.
“If we’re naked in bed tangled in the sheets,” he said, “tell a story that doesn’t kill the mood.” So I told him about when I slept with my high school English teacher when I was eighteen. Just the month before, the teacher had handed me an essay with my first C and told me that I had to earn the A. I told Nini that I left for college at the end of the summer brokenhearted, because the teacher had decided to marry his long-suffering girlfriend.
“What happened to the man who gave up such a treasure?” Nini wanted to know, smiling greedily at the scandalous nature of it all. Then he laughed with the same kind of wickedness that had drawn me to him at the beginning, when I told him that my teacher’s girlfriend eventually left him and that when he called me soon after, I ignored the ringing phone for days.
“But you loved him, no?”
“Ero affogato.” I was drowning in love.
“And what about now, with me?” he wants to know.
“Sto ancora affogando,” I’d told him. I’m still drowning.
But now I know how to hold my breath long enough to survive.
“Regina, tesoro, quando torni?” Nini asks when he sees that I have emptied our closet of my clothing, that the dresser drawers are bare.
I shrug and say I’ll come back after the funeral. I pack everything. There is surprisingly little that I call my own. He drives me to the airport just before his afternoon classes. During the ride, he looks at me with nervous glances, and I wonder what questions he wants to ask.
When we arrive at the airport, he puts a hand on my knee. “I would wait with you, but—”
“Giotto’s crosses,” I say. “I know. I’ll be fine.”
The customs officer in Philadelphia, a tall, lanky woman with skin the color of brown ocher, smooths down imaginary flyaway hairs from her tightly pulled bun before taking the passport from my hands. She examines the cover of the well-worn document before opening its pages, speckled with coffee stains and flecks of dried Chianti. It looks more like a coaster than a federal document.
&nbs
p; When my Italian citizenship came through last year, I treated my American identity with less care, but now it provides convenience, a bit of comfort. It gives me a name that makes sense in America, Regina Henry. My Italian passport calls me by another name, Regina Casadei. The officer turns to the last pages, thumbing through my expired student visa to the final stamp.
“You’ve been gone a long time,” she says, raising an accusatory eyebrow. “What brings you back?”
“My father died,” I say.
She nods, and I can tell she wants to say more, to offer a word or two of sympathy. Instead, she gives me a second nod that says she won’t ask any more questions. She flattens my passport to an empty page and brings her stamp down, marking the date and granting me entry back into the country I had given up without hesitation. She returns the small book to my waiting hands, and as I walk away, she gives me a line she delivers a hundred times a day: “Welcome home.”
My mother had to circle the airport while I cleared customs. She doesn’t get out of the car to greet me or help with the enormous suitcase I struggle to shove into the backseat. When I get in the car, her teeth are clenched in frustration, but she relaxes a little when I lock the seat belt in place. She takes me in as though she expected someone different.
“Looks like you’ve lost weight,” she says, and then she reaches out and touches my hair, which I keep cut close to my head. “I can’t believe you walk around like this.” She grabs and releases a handful of knots and curls, as if she finds them offensive.
“It’s easier this way,” I tell her. “Besides, the only person I know who does hair in Florence is this Senegalese woman and, I swear, the last time I let her perm it, she nearly took out all my hair. Maybe I’ll do something different while I’m in Philly. I bet it’s cheaper here. Anyway, I suppose I could use a change.”
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 16
