Willing

by Scott Spencer

  Gabrielle noticed me looking at the attendant and said That’s Stephanie, this is her sixth tour with us. Every time one of the men, drunk with success after so many beautiful women on our stops around the world, he makes a try for Stephanie. And it never happens. You understand? She is here only to do her job, nothing more. Message received.

  Let me give you some good advice, Gabrielle said, tilting her head, smiling at me, as if there was something faintly bizarre in my personality. It’s very simple. The ladies want to be treated like ladies. They like it if you speak politely, show some interest. They are no different from anyone else. A present, an offer of food or drink, all very good. But most of all they very much appreciate cleanliness.

  Just then, Jordan began to cough. He bent over from the force of it, writhing, while the heel of his left foot beat against the floor, as if he were timing his convulsions. Dr. Gordon handed a handkerchief to him and poised his hand an inch or two above the boy’s back, not touching him but creating some kind of paternal force field, his lips pursed, his chin high, his posture rigid, raking the room with his blue imperious eyes, daring anyone to come near.

  7

  A NOISY, none too smooth takeoff, though spirits on board were running high, and I may have been the only one to notice the turbulence, the precipitous dip of the wings, the thud of hydraulics, the high-pitched strain of the engines, as piercing as an ambulance siren. I scratched the side of my head and came away with a little blood on my fingernails. I wondered how I could still be bleeding. Being upended by that car seemed to be something that had happened a year ago.

  And now I was here. Avery Jankowsky, all 192 pounds of me, borne aloft in this refurbished 737. The rows of seats had been torn out and replaced by big leather chairs, roomy enough even for Piedmont, and placed in such a way that most of us wouldn’t have to have to sit near or even have visual contact with any of the other passengers. I was here to make my fortune, and I really ought to have been starting to accumulate pages right away, but the little bit of solitude afforded me by my seat’s feng shui suited me just fine. Try as I might to connect with the other men and to begin filling my notebook with notes and observations, I was involuntarily shutting down, wanting only to be left alone, and hoping not to be noticed.

  The seats could assume any number of positions: you could be as rigid as a defendant at Nuremberg, you could lounge like a starlet pool-side at the Chateau Marmont, or lower yourself the full 180 degrees and transform your seat into a coffin-sized bed. We each had a private TV, a DVD player, and access to a quirky collection of movies. They seemed as if they’d been picked up at a flea market, starring lesser-known actors like Tom Sizemore and Lolita Davidovich. Along with the obscure little films was a full complement of pornography—with titles ranging from smirking Hole-y Ghost to the punishing Ass Torture, but, for the most part, so-called erotica from mainstream sources such as Playboy and Penthouse, featuring nurses, cheerleaders, and naked skiers. We were also given a travel kit, containing moisturizer, mouthwash, slippers, sleep mask, inflatable neck brace, and, the only discordant note, in my opinion, a so-called Power Pak, a little cellophane pouch filled with B vitamins and extract of ginseng, reminding me of those supplements they display near the cash register at truck stops along the interstate. We were each given a little globe made of semi-transparent blue glass, upon which was etched our route and destinations—Reykjavik, Oslo, Riga—each one signified by a charming little red heart.

  Stephanie, the flight attendant, was crouched in the aisle toward the back of the plane, fussing over Jordan. She had served him a fruit and cheese plate, and now she was pointing out things on the platter: the grapes, the brie, the figs, the Stilton. The Metal Men were playing cards. The table between them was already a chaos of candy wrappers, Coke cans, and money. Sean was dozing, a script in a bright red CAA binder tepeed on his chest.

  I heard a clicking noise. My first thought was that something was going wrong with the plane. How fitting it would be, a planeload of men off on a sex tour going down in the Atlantic. How little we would be mourned. None of the other men seemed to notice it, or else they weren’t bothered by it. I looked at Stephanie, but she was teaching Jordan about Spanish goat cheese.

  I played Hole-y Ghost on my video screen, in the unlikely case someone checked out what I was watching. (The Ghost was a formidable brunette with a muscular, angry-looking body, dressed in a red nightgown, who hovered over a sleeping man, one of those skinny guys with plenty of tats and a billy club dick, and whispered Fuck Me into his ear.) While this flickered on the plasma screen in front of me, I concentrated on eavesdropping on the man closest to me: an African American at least six and a half feet tall, wearing a caramel-colored suit and a dark green shirt. His long legs were stretched out, his ankles crossed; his voice was deep, with something amused and generous in it, a lubricating willingness to think well of people. His name was Len Cobb, and, it turned out, he was a professional basketball player whom I had actually seen play a few years back at Madison Square Garden, when he was a reserve forward for the visiting Phoenix Suns in a game against the Knicks. Len was talking with the short, brown skinned man I’d met in the waiting room, Tony, fretful Tony, with his small hands, delicate wrists, and nascent belly. Len was asking Tony where he was from, and Tony said Akron, but added that his mother was from Syria and his father from Naples. Which reminded Len of his days playing in the Italian League, where he got back into shape after missing a season due to knee surgery. Len still knew some Italian, which he tried out on Tony, who only smiled, showing his small melancholy teeth, and shook his head, explaining that the little Italian he knew he had forgotten many years ago.

  By now, Stephanie had left Jordan. She was standing next to Webb; it took me a moment to realize Webb had her by the wrist and was holding her there.

  Len was sketching the outlines of his life for Tony. Cobb was friendly, but it was an empty friendliness, the patter of a man used to life on planes, used to talking to strangers. He knew how to boil it down: childhood in Oakland, scholarship to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, drafted by the Seventy Sixers, knee surgery, Italy, Turkey, a foolish marriage to a Dutch model, the less said about her the better, the return to the NBA, and now retirement at the age of thirty-seven, with plenty of money and half a century to spend it. Now I do business, he said. It’s what I studied in college. I’ve opened up a Lenny’s Car Wash in fourteen markets, and I’ve got other things, too. I’ve got a share in a ski resort in Utah, and I’m negotiating an interest in this place in Massachusetts called Jiminy Peak. Ever hear of it? Me? asked Tony. No, no, I don’t ski. Hey, me neither, said Cobb, and put out his fist, inviting Tony to bump knuckles in solidarity.

  A crescent moon swayed above the rushing clouds. Castle had taken a seat across the aisle from Michael Piedmont. He was having him sign some papers; my guess was that Piedmont had booked the tour at the last minute and the paperwork the rest of us had completed before boarding was being completed now. The multitier system of expectation and privilege was in effect, even here.

  Mr. Castle said I should ask you how you made your money, Len was saying to Tony. He said I would find it interesting.

  I won the lottery in my home state of Ohio, Tony said. You did? Len said—he sounded alarmed. The whole thing? Yes, the whole thing. Jesus, Len said, but Tony interrupted him. Please, don’t say that, only in prayer. All right, said Len, so tell me, how much did you win? One hundred million dollars, said Tony, with the kind of sadness with which a doctor delivers a fatal diagnosis.

  My microrecorder was in my pocket, a Sony the size and shape of a pack of smokes. I pressed the red RECORD button without taking it out of my pocket.

  Before I won I had nothing material. I was borrowing money from my brother, my sister, my cousins. There was no end in sight.

  So, uh, how many tickets did you buy?

  Only one, and there was an outcry against me because the money I used, the two dollars, people said it was stolen.

>   You stole two dollars?

  More like a dollar and forty cents. I already had sixty cents.

  How do you steal a dollar and forty cents? What did you do? Rob a five-year-old?

  Pennies. I took pennies. Starting at seven in the morning. I was visiting a friend who worked in a Cumberland Farms store. On the counter, near the cash register, there was a bowl, like a cereal bowl, and when people had an extra penny they’d throw it in, and when someone needed a penny, they could take one out. It was an honor system.

  You took the pennies from the extra pennies bowl?

  Yes, I took the pennies. Not all of them. Some I got other places. There was an Exxon station, there they had the pennies in a paper cup. The 7-Eleven keeps them in an ashtray.

  So you went around stealing pennies so you could buy a lottery ticket?

  No, I needed money to buy ointment for athlete’s foot. I had terrible fungus between the toes on my right foot. I was constantly taking off my shoes and socks and sitting on a chair, or a stool, or the ground and scratching the itch on and on until I was bleeding. Now, you might ask me: Tony, why didn’t you simply borrow the money for a tube of Lotrimin, or some other over-the-counter medication? And to that I would have to say Pride, my friend, pride. There was not a person I knew who I didn’t owe money. I could not ask another person for another thing. Was I a criminal? No, that’s not Tony Dinato. I took pennies. The government is thinking of doing away with the penny; the mint and the people who work there have better things to do with their time, so no more new ones, and they’re going to phase out the old ones, that’s how worthless they are. I know that what I did was not something I can be proud of, but technically speaking, those pennies I helped myself to belonged to no one. They were left by customers, for other customers. A lawyer said to me that the pennies in question were in a gray area between transactions. They did not belong to the store, and they no longer belonged to the people who dropped them into the cup. People had gotten rid of them; they had washed their hands of them. It was rude to take them but not illegal.

  What happened to the athlete’s foot cream?

  I had no idea it was so expensive. For the smallest tube, eight dollars. I stood there in the pharmacy, with my two hundred pennies in my pocket, so heavy they were pulling my pants down, and I realized that I would have to continue on the great American penny hunt for the rest of the day, the rest of the week maybe, in order to afford my medicine. And so I walked out, a dejected man. I walked back to where my good friend was working, Cumberland Farms, with the idea that at least I could buy a coffee and a buttered Kaiser roll. But they had no more rolls. They had bagels, but I didn’t want a bagel. They had coffee, but I didn’t want a coffee without a Kaiser roll. I was not looking to get an acid stomach, you understand. So I bought a lottery ticket. I dumped all my pennies on the counter, and my friend and I counted them, and put them in little stacks of ten each, and counted all the little stacks to make sure there were twenty of them, and he gave me the ticket. Three days later I was a rich man.

  Even from a distance I could sense the toll this story was taking on Cobb, how it churned at the pit of his stomach, as if he had eaten something soft but alive, something that seethed in its own sour persistence, and which must be vanquished and digested, using pints, quarts, even gallons of bile to get the dirty job done. He had been continually shaking his head in disbelief when Tony was telling his story, and now he was silent, gazing at the crescent moon and meditatively rubbing his stomach. Well that seals it, he finally said. I am never going to buy another lottery ticket. Why not? Tony asked. Because there is no way I am going to meet a winner and be a winner—you either get one or the other, never both.

  Suddenly, I heard a woman’s voice in my ear. We’re opening a beautiful bottle of wine. Startled, I looked up at Stephanie. She wore an apron over her blue skirt and jacket—a little gesture of costumery to indicate that now she was a waitress—and she held a wineglass by the stem, offering it to me. It’s a ’99 Beychevelle, chosen especially for this flight by Gabrielle. Sure, I said, love some. My ears were congested, and my voice sounded buried in the middle of my head. May I bring you some pâté and olives to enjoy with your wine? How had they known? I wondered. Had that been on the questionnaire? That would be nice, I said. Then I’ll be right back. I’m Stephanie, by the way.

  When Stephanie retreated to the galley, I heard someone shouting behind me, his voice raw and deprived. I felt an instinctual cringing at the sound of that male rage, as well as a degree of morbid curiosity. Men gravitate toward violence, but fearfully; violence spills out of a barroom, and the cowards race out into the street, to watch, thankful it’s not them trading blows. It was Webb. I could have guessed. He was standing in front of a soft, middle-aged guy in a blazer and gray slacks, with high wavy hair, like a country singer, who I would later learn was named Romulus Linwood, from Pennsylvania, the owner of a hugely successful company called CutMax that sold kitchen utensils, primarily knives, door to door. This was Linwood’s third foray into sex tourism, and it may have given him an extra measure of detachment; he listened to Webb and kept his own face devoid of expression. He ought to have been sitting with the Metal Men playing poker; you’d never have any idea what he was holding. You want to be careful around me, Webb was saying. I am not someone you want to fuck with. Linwood rubbed his hands together, as if to warm them, and then shrugged and turned away. Webb caught him by the shoulder—he was certainly not going to let Linwood simply walk away from him. As soon as Webb touched him, Linwood whirled around and shoved Webb, pushed his hands hard against his chest, and sent him stumbling backward. Webb, of course, could not let this stand. Once he righted himself, he launched himself at Linwood. However, the Metal Men were on the case, and they intercepted Webb before his hands could find their way to Linwood’s throat. Linwood tried to look defiant and amused, but even from a distance I could see his face had drained of color.

  I looked up and down the aisle to see what Russell was making of all this. In fact, I had already picked him out as the tour member with whom I would probably having the most conversations. He would certainly give my book an added dimension. However, I could not find him. I slowed my gaze, thinking I must somehow be skipping over him as I looked up and down the length of the plane. Sean, from California, was watching something on his video monitor. He gripped his left shoulder with his right hand and wept at whatever was on the screen. His small, sensitive mouth was turned so radically downward it almost seemed like a pantomime of sorrow; the tears, however, were unquestionably real.

  Stephanie returned with my wine, pâté, and olives, presented them to me on a tray, along with a neatly folded napkin and a small vase holding a single white orchid on a long curving stem. Here you go, Avery. Thanks, I said. You know that guy Russell? The psychiatrist? she said, opening my armrest, pulling out the table, and placing the tray before me. Yes, I said, I was looking forward to talking to him. Getting a little free psychiatric help while I was at it, I added with a laugh. Oh, he had to suddenly change his plans, Stephanie said, glancing over her shoulder. Really? I said. He never even got on the plane? I felt stricken, as if Russell had abandoned me personally, deliberately.

  I picked up the wineglass, swirled the contents, sniffed it—the smell of wine often reminded me that life can be good. I gathered myself in. May I ask you a question, Stephanie? She straightened up, looked faintly surprised. Of course you can. I made a couple of self-deprecating gestures. Well, I guess you get this all the time, but…isn’t this sort of weird for you? She knit her brows, choosing to pretend she had no idea what I was talking about. And I, suddenly concerned that I might be insulting her, waved my hand, taking in the lot of the Fleming travelers. I mean, look at us, we’re a pretty motley crew. I’m very happy with my job, she said, clearly offended. I love flying, going new places, and meeting people. I work two weeks, and then I have twenty days off, and I make what I was getting at Delta, but with a lot of free time. She showed her teeth, regi
stering a willingness to smile, if not a smile itself.

  As Stephanie made her way down the aisle, Castle emerged from the cockpit. Gentlemen! he cried out. His voice was full of holes. May I have your attention? If Tony’s every word was steeped in sadness and held within it the heavy breath of a sigh, there was a kind of joshing merriness in Castle’s tone; winks fluttered within it like butterflies.

  I want to welcome you to Fleming Tours. As I’m sure you noticed, we were a little late getting up in the air…He paused, did the old jack-o-lantern. Let’s just hope that’s the last trouble any of us has getting anything up.

  The laughter was vague. Castle clapped his hands together, made a clownish grimace—he knew how to work not getting a laugh into the general routine. Sean switched off his movie, stowed the screen, and dried his face with the heels of his hands.

  Stephanie had set up a bar at the front of the cabin, just to the left of the curtain leading to the cockpit. Castle walked over to it, poured himself a club soda, and yanked loose a bunch of ruby red grapes. He dropped a couple of them into his soda and popped one into his mouth. He chewed carefully, like someone who just came from the dentist. What I am about to say is not a rule, it’s a suggestion, something I’ve learned from experience. He paused, shrugged, did his best to undercut the air of authority he had assumed. I’m not here trying to tell anyone what to do, but I can promise you something, I’ve been on a number of these trips, and I’ve come to see what works best. And it all boils down to this: leave your troubles behind. Don’t e-mail the office, don’t. One of the Metal Men raised his hand, though he spoke without being called on. We’re spot traders in oil and other commodities, he said. Our business moves as fast as computers allow. And every six months it gets more difficult than the six months before. You understand what I’m saying? Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, and—Castle stopped him with a raised hand. These are only suggestions. I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to run your business any more than you’d tell me how to run mine. One of the other Metal Men called out Oh he might tell you how to run your business, if you give him a chance. All three of the Metal Men laughed at this, though the one who had spoken first threw a macadamia nut at the one who had made a joke at his expense.