Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

  Three shaky days later, on a Saturday afternoon, I called Stella Jr.; there was an RSVP number on the invitation, which I ran through an internet search engine to ensure it didn't belong to Stella Sr. I didn't know even the first words to say to her: This is your father? That struck me as a false title, even more fraudulent than Aneta deeming me a poet. (Ex-father, ex-poet, ex-drunk: Everything I am gets prefaced with an ex.) Therefore, "This is Bennie," I said, when I hooked her on the phone after several hangups on her voicemail. "Bennie who?" she said, and inside I buckled. So it had, after all, been a vicious trick of Stella Sr.'s. "Bennie ... Ford," I said, and then the voice said, "Oh, God. Let me get Stel," and I heard the voice whisper, "I think it's your dad," followed by a lengthy silence. With a prick, it occurred to me that I had no clue what my daughter's voice might sound like. I had only ever heard her coo and cry when she was the small pink creature I called Speck. I, who lived on words, who had eaten them, drunk them, dreamt them, created them, who even now still inhaled and exhaled them, transforming them, in my translations, as a body converts oxygen to carbon dioxide, had vanished from her life before words had entered it. The one thing I might've given her, I didn't.

  "Bennie," she said. The voice was lilting, sunny, freewheeling, recognizably Californian. "Wow."

  Not knowing what to say, I said, "Maybe you can imagine, but I don't know what to say."

  "You got the invitation."

  "It was very nice."

  "Mom and I went round and round about that," she said. "I won." I had to make a quick little mental leap to connect "Mom" with Stella Sr., as my brain wasn't equipped with that particular equal sign. Mom. The word flipflopped inside my head: Wow. "How are you, Bennie?" she said.

  "How are you?" I replied.

  "I'm good, I'm great." We went on like this for a bit. "Hey," she said, "this feels like a weird question to ask—I guess it is a weird question, sorry—but is Grandma still alive? I heard she had a stroke or something."

  Grandma = Miss Willa, another mental leap across sharp rocks. Mom = Stella. Everyone had a stock role to play but me: The part of the Bennie will be played by Bennie. "She's alive, yes," I told her. "She's in the next room, in fact, watching an Iron Chef rerun. The stroke calmed her down a bit. I don't know how much you know about her. Kind of a yin and yang to it."

  An anxious, brittle laugh. "I don't know what to say to that."

  "Let's just say she used to be more of a handful. Hey, look," I said, sensing in her laughter a wave to surf in on, "I'd like to come to your wedding."

  "Seriously? That's fantastic." Genuine-sounding glee.

  "And I'm looking forward to meeting the young man." This, of course, was knuckleheaded on two disproportionate counts. One: "the young man"? What was that—a flaccid Robert Young impersonation? I winced as the words spilled across my lips. Second:

  "Oh, Bennie, yikes. Syl is a woman. I'm gay. I'm sorry, you couldn't have known..."

  "No, no, hey ... groovy." Groovy, that's what I said. In ransacking my mind for something to say that wouldn't come across as shocked or disapproving or priggish or homophobic, none of which I was, or had any right to be, I burped the word "groovy," which I don't believe I'd uttered since the age of fourteen and even then with a lacquer of irony. Yet as inappropriate and pot-perfumed as groovy was, it was far superior to the next batter in my mental dugout: I almost popped out a blithe & sincere "Whatever floats your boat," which was about the worst I could've said outside of citing our mutual love of chicks as evidence of the DNA bond. Groovy. Even now, however, with all this time to consider it, I can't tell you what an ideal reaction would have been. Maybe the empty wisdom of Miss Willa's Post-it note: LOVE IS LOVE.

  "Mom still hasn't wrapped her head around it but she's trying," she said. "You'll adore Syl, she's totally wonderful." Would I? It hardly mattered. We talked a bit more. Speck did catering for film sets, and had apparently achieved some success because she referenced movie stars by their first names and lamented her busy schedule with the dégagé calm of someone who has everything entirely under control. She'd met Sylvana, an entertainment lawyer, at a "wrap party" two years ago and they were considering having children(!). Adopting of course, she said. For their "honeymoon"—does that require quotation marks? Why am I compelled to write about my daughter's nuptials in the manner of a Zagat review?—they were going to Mali and Senegal, where Sylvana had arranged to visit some adoption agencies. Stella Jr. found the prospect of parenting more daunting & fearsome than Syl did, to which I could offer no words of counsel. Syl was a "big fan" of my old poetry and she and Stella Jr. wondered what had happened to my writing, to which I responded, falsely I suppose, that I often wondered that same thing myself. Their bookshelves held a couple of my translations, too, but Stella Jr. apologized for what she gently termed their "neglect" of Eastern European writing. Syl was really big into Third World lit, Stella Jr. said, mentioning a couple of postcolonial writers from the Indian subcontinent with whom I was familiar only as vowelly names on book spines. She and Sylvana loved L.A.—she admitted this was a contrarian viewpoint—and lived downtown which rather extended the contrarian streak. At times our conversation was so light and easy that it disturbed me; with that much water under the bridge, it was hard to believe the bridge could still be standing. Finally I told her I had a request I expected her to deny, and, frankly, I would understand her denying it more easily than I would her granting it. But I wanted to ask.

  "Shoot," she said.

  I asked if she would let me walk her down the aisle ... if, of course—here I stammered—there was an aisle.

  "Oh, wow, Bennie. That's a jump." What followed was a silence that could be classified as huge. "Mom would flip." Another silence. "We ... we were planning on walking down together, I guess. Jesus, Bennie, this has been so ... so nice but that seems like zero to sixty in an awfully short time." (An automotive analogy—ah, my daughter was L.A. through and through.) "Let me to talk to Syl, okay? After all we're in this together." I told her not to worry, that it was an undeserved longshot, a selfish dream lobbed from a long-lost past. Inviting me was more than enough, I didn't mean to push. Silly me, etc. "I just need to think about it," Speck told me.

  I can't say precisely why but after I hung up the phone I put my head in my hands and wept—hoarse, dry sobs I was unable to stifle or control.

  An hour later Stella Jr. called back. "Syl thinks it's a gorgeous idea," she said. "That it's beautifully circular. Another twist—wait, how did she put this?—of unconventional conventionality. My God, it's going to be a day." That's when she proposed her compromise plan—that we'd meet tonight, at the non-rehearsal dinner, which by my estimate, dear American Airlines, should currently be in the appetizer stage. Insert your own cursewords here. Make sure they're your favorites because they're all for you.

  When I went to tell Miss Willa that I'd spoken to her granddaughter, whose mysterious estrangement from us she'd ceased commenting upon twenty years ago, I found her drafting an epic, nine-page Post-it note message with her mother's old copy of the Picayune's Creole Cookbook (1901 edition) cracked open before her on the TV tray. "Miss Willa," I said, but she held up a narrow, vein-braided hand to shush me before resuming her labors. When she finally finished she handed me the pile of yellow stickies with a stern nod. I read them one by one. With painstaking care, she'd transcribed, in her wobbly avian scrawl, a passage from the cookbook—a rebuke, I gathered quickly, for the last few nights of me glumly serving her frozen dinners. It went like this:

  THE SERVING IS

  THE MOST IMPORTANT

  AFTER COOKING. NEVER

  CROWD A DISH INTENDED

  FOR AN INVALID. SPREAD

  A DAINTY NAPKIN ON

  THE SALVER. ARRANGE

  THE FOOD IN A MOST

  APPETIZING WAY, LAY

  A ROSEBUD OR A

  FLOWER FRESH FROM

  THE GARDEN ON THE

  SALVER, AND BRING

  IN THE DAINTY,

  T
EMPTING MORSEL

  WITH A HAPPY, CHEERY

  SMILE, THOUGH YOUR

  HEART MAY BE SINKING.

  "But, Mother," I said. "That's what I'm trying to tell you. My heart isn't sinking."

  ***

  That night I bought my ticket via www.aa.com, your cluttery but operable website. It was a "Net SAAver" special—for, as I believe I've mentioned, $392.68. It doesn't soften my stance one bit to admit that I liked the nice price. One of your competitors wanted a full hundred dollars more. When I clicked "Purchase and Confirm" I felt a shudder run through my body—somewhere between giddy and forlorn, hopeful and frightened, not an entirely pleasant sensation but not unpleasant either. For a long while afterward I remained at my desk in the unlit room, smoking cigarette after cigarette while the computer's lava-lamp screensaver threw undulating colors into the thickening & billowing bluish haze. Something terrible must've happened that night—I remember the city filling with sirens.

  Drunk, he was unable to walk. The false limb unsteadied him enough while sober; but after glass after glass of beer, Walenty found himself mortally imbalanced, clinging to chairs and tables to stay upright. By now it was very late at night and the black sea out beyond the Molo Audace was calm and moonflecked. The men were saying their goodbyes and some were saying ugly things about their wives asleep at home and the work they had to do the next day. Walenty had no place to sleep and he blurted this fact, laughingly, to the bear, who laughed, too—so uproariously that tears ran down his reddened cheeks. Everyone thought it hilarious except the sober dwarf behind the bar who ordered the bear to escort Walenty to a pensione on the hill below the cathedral.

  With Walenty supported by the bear, they tottered through the streets howling songs in their native tongues, a typhoon of slurred baritone babble. When they awakened the old woman who ran the pensione she scolded them harshly and even spat at the bear whose subsequent laughter only enraged her further, provoking another blast of spittle. There was a gray mustache above her lip so slight it could be mistaken for dirt. One of her eyes was blind and milky, and her nubby fingers were sootblacked; one of the fingers, Walenty noticed, was missing a nail. Examining her closer, he realized she was not as old as one might think. She was rather, like the rooms she rented, overused.

  The room was small and moldy and the vast stains splashed on the walls suggested a long-receded flood. With the old-looking woman standing in the doorway, the bear helped Walenty onto the bed, its mattress thin as a cracker, and kissed him and pinched his cheek in the way of Italian men. As the bear left, the woman again spat at him and he ran down the hallway hooting with a laughter that continued even after he was free outside. Lying on the bed, Walenty could hear the laughs spilling down the cobble-stoned hill. He slept with his leg attached and was dazzled by placid dreams.

  He awoke the next morning just before dawn; even after a buoyant night of drinking, he was still a model soldier. The birdsongs surprised him—the sound was like that of a thousand music boxes being played at once. Lying there, he could not recall the last time he had heard birds. The Germans, went the rumor, had driven them out of Poland, and they'd been wholly absent during the Anzio fighting. Once Walenty had seen a black vulture tearing at the groin of a dead British infantryman. The men had tried to ignore it until they saw a recognizable organ in the vulture's beak and then one of the soldiers, an otherwise calm and stoical Varsovian who had taught music before the war, stood up and shot it. Later they discovered it was called locally Avvoltoio monaco and had been thought to be extinct.

  When Walenty sat up in bed he was astonished at how good he felt. He had never been a drinker because he was oversensitive to the following day's aftereffects, and he'd expected, darkly, to awaken craving morphine. Now, craving coffee instead, he remembered the girl at the café and ran his fingers through his hair. He had never been so happy in his life.

  Dear American Airlines, you miserable fucks, I'm going to keep writing. I'm going to keep writing and writing and writing and writing and you're going to keep reading and reading because for the first time in my life it wasn't me that blew it—it was you. Since you've stranded me here for at best this day and this night, blaming mute thunder and dry rain and fugitive winds, Acts of God my ass—since you've trapped me here alone, caught between the dregs of one life and the debris of another, then you will sit here beside me, goddamn you, you will sit here beside me and you will listen to me, you will listen for as long as your boot sticks me to the floor, for as long as you hold me here, for as long as my voice holds out, I'm going to keep writing, goddamnit, we have a long night ahead and I'm not going to stop.

  ***

  I may, however, stop smoking. Fueling my lungs is getting to be an onerous chore. One of the TSA screeners has made it his playful task to discourage me, by unrelentingly pulling me aside for de trop inspection whenever I re-pass through the security checkpoint, and while I wouldn't confess this to him, it's working. He's a boisterous senior with a snowy crewcut who probably used to work in industrial sales. "Them things gonna kill ya, tiger," he says to me. (Why "tiger"? An endearing mid-westernism, I suppose. Grrr.) "Well," I say, as he runs his wand beneath my armpits, my groin, "I wish they'd hurry up. I've been waiting forty years." It occurs to me that jolly cracks about suicide are taboo at the checkpoints but this one is pretty oblique and anyway my ex-salesman seems to get the joke. Life didn't drop him where he expected to be at his age either. He liked Ike and switched to margarine and opened his hymnal to the page as directed but here he is anyway, still shoveling snow and still polishing a nametag, a thousand miles from Florida. Hast thou not poured me out as milk, wailed Job, and curdled me like cheese? "You think about what I said," he calls after me. Old friend, you don't know the half of it.

  Outside beside the gray Skycap Services hutch is where I smoke. Across the street from me is a train platform and a parking garage where rust has left vertical stains on the concrete and steel panels, and, beyond the garage, the giant and completely booked Hilton hotel with its monolithic face of black windows that reminds me, not warmly, of the architecture of Soviet-era Bulgaria. The crowd of smokers keeps growing denser and I wonder if the tension of being stranded at O'Hare is luring some reformed smokers back into the fold; I'm increasingly getting hit on for smokes. The crowd keeps getting surlier, too. I heard one man announce that there were no hotel rooms to be had unless you went south of Gary, Indiana. Another smoker, a postmenopausal woman with a trademark Virginia Slims voice, added that this was partly due to a medical information technologies convention that's being held downtown. Well, whadyaknow. Another fella chimed in that there are no rental cars to be had, either—not a single sedan in all of Chicagoland. "I guess we're snowed in for the night," someone said. "Except there's no snow," someone else retorted (stealing, I suspect, the first guy's punchline), and then the whole gang laughed the most mirthless laugh you've ever heard.

  "Hey-ho, here he comes again," my TSA screener said to me on my way back in. "Still kicking."

  "Kicking and screaming," I said.

  "You get 'em, tiger," he said, this time letting me pass by unhindered.

  Along with the smoking, choosing my latest perch is also growing more difficult. It seems mathematically improbable but I feel certain that I've sampled the O'Chairs at every one of the gates here—finding none satisfactory, of course. I'm an airport Goldilocks! Currently I'm at H6, where I'm seated beneath a sign displaying an illustration of an airplane beside an encircled question mark. It seems to signify nothing. (I would know if there were an information booth here because I'm sitting precisely where it would be.) Or, from another angle, to signify everything: immobile planes, meet festering questions. Anyway, no one seems to notice it. I should note, for the record, that throughout the afternoon I intermittently inquired of the attendant at the American Airlines desk—above which this sign should probably be hanging—just when I might expect to soar away from here but she never could say. (Once it was a he, but same story.) After a
while I stopped doing so because it seemed futile plus I was beginning to feel like a stalker. It's never comforting when someone says to you, "You need to try to calm down, sir." But the attendants are facing a lot of heat so I don't hold anything against them. Certainly I wouldn't be able to do their jobs. By now I'd have jabbed my fingers, Stooges-style, into the eyes of a dozen disgruntled passengers, me included. You pinheads ain't flying the friendly skies. Pow! This is America, sit the fuck down.

  Stray thought: All day now I've been thinking that O'Hare evokes Purgatory but I've been dismissing this perceived likeness as the product of an addled mind. Yet now I'm not so sure. The figurative sometimes congeals with the literal. Consider the view from my chair at H6: Sprawled 'round me is a crowd of temporary refugees waiting, waiting, yawning, drumming fingers on kneecaps, asking cellphones what they did to deserve this, rereading The Da Vinci Code to keep from having to stare at the carpet. Even the million-miler business travelers have run out of steam—the suited laptop jockey beside me is playing a version of solitaire on his computer and the way he's sighing and petulantly flicking his fingerpad leads me to believe that this is his last refuge of mental and/or physical activity. Airports are usually so fluid—people moving like fish in schools. But movement is scarce here tonight: stragglesome wanderers, looking purposeless and disattached, strolling for the sake of motion. Mothers are unduly snapping at children. Middle-aged men are learning to use the unexplored features of their digital wristwatches. A semi-punished lot, all of us: imprisoned within a pause, desperate to ascend.