Take It Off

by J. Minter

  “Yeah, that’s my dad, not me. But thanks,” I said. I was being sarcastic, but Suki didn’t seem to notice.

  “Anyway, I think that butler guy made us dinner. And I’m starving. You wanna go check it out?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  As I followed her down the stairs, she called out, “Don’t you love that about traveling? You’re always starving, and everything always tastes good.”

  * * *

  When we finished eating, the butler cleared our plates and sat down with his pipe. He obviously wanted us to stay, but I was itching to find a phone or a computer or something that would get me home to Flan.

  “Wine?” he asked. “The young monsieur always has wine with dinner, but you two didn’t drink a thing.”

  “I’d love a glass,” Suki said.

  I asked for a beer. As he got us our drinks, Suki asked, “Why do you call him monsieur? I mean, you’re not French, are you?”

  The old man shrugged his shoulders. “He likes it. It took me a long time to grow accustomed to it, of course, and still sometimes I slip up. But it reminds him of his childhood, so I oblige him.”

  “But isn’t he half British and half Venezuelan?” I asked

  “Oh, no no. Penelope’s second marriage—after Lord Suttwilley, and before Benito Isquierdo—was to Yves de la Tour. Surely you’ve heard of him?”

  We shook our heads.

  “Oh. These are different times. Well, Rob Tour, as he was known in this country. ‘Rob’ was a nickname he earned because he would rob your money, and then your women.” The old butler chuckled, like that was the funniest thing he had ever heard. “Penelope ran off to the south of France with him, and they conceived the young monsieur and lived there for some time. But old Rob Tour got restless eventually, and he left her his fortune and went off to make another one in some other part of the world. Lord Suttwilley still loved her, the old fool. And he took her back. But he never let her forget where the boy came from. He called him Rob to the day he died, just to torture her.”

  “Oh, is that how Rob got his nickname?”

  “Oh, that and … Well, he is his father’s child.” The butler chuckled again. “It’s better than his given name, I suppose. You know they named him after Serge Gainsbourg? Well! I told them not to, but no one ever minds me. Now then, to the study? I made some wonderful cookies this afternoon …”

  As we followed him through the halls of the house, Suki nudged me, all, like, “Isn’t this funny?” But I was feeling pretty low and desperate, so I didn’t say anything. In fact, this was about when I stopped being able to talk to Suki in full sentences because all I could think about was Flan and what Rob might or might not be doing with her panties.

  Psychoanalysis for breakfast

  It was noon when David woke up and realized that today was the day his friends had been saying they were coming home. He had no idea how he felt about that, and so he decided he should call Rob up and they should go see what Flan and February Flood were up to. They’d hung out with them the last two days in a row, and David had felt more happy and comfortable than he had in a while.

  He skidded into the living room in boxers and socks, but he was stopped on his way to the bathroom.

  “David,” his father said, without turning away from the window. His dad was staring off into space, like he always did for at least half an hour every Sunday morning. He had this theory that ninety percent of what ailed the modern person could be cured by half an hour of quiet contemplation a week, and he was strict with himself. “Something is troubling you.”

  “Uh … not really, Dad.”

  “Is it … about your friends?”

  “Um, yeah, probably. But—”

  “David, sit down.”

  David sat down on the ottoman in front of his dad’s chair and waited. Sam Grobart kept his eyes on the window.

  “What’s wrong with your friends?”

  “Dad.”

  “Is it about the trip?”

  David had had a lifetime of experience with his dad’s analysis. The best thing to do was to give the obvious explanation, and confirm his thinking. “Yeah, well, it feels really unfair that I got kicked out when they’re always breaking more rules than I am.”

  “Mmmm …”

  “I mean, it’s just dumb luck, I guess. But then none of them even bothered to e-mail or call or check up on me or anything. They’re probably all having a great time, and they won’t even remember my name when they come back.”

  “Yes. How does that make you feel?”

  “Pissed off!” Weirdly, this was making David feel better. “And then Jonathan e-mails me, but it’s like all he wants to know is how Flan’s doing …”

  “You’ve been spending a lot of time at the Floods’, it seems.”

  “Yeah, well, Jonathan asked me to ‘keep an eye on her’ for him, because he’s paranoid that his new stepbrother is going to steal her away.”

  “Mmmmm …”

  “But actually, hanging out with the three of them has been a blast. It’s almost a relief.”

  “Let me tell you a little story, David. When I was a junior at Yale spending all my time trying to get into the honors thesis class for my senior year, I had a friend. Let’s call him … John. He was more of a party type, and he always had cute girlfriends. He decided he wanted to take his second semester of his junior year abroad in Spain, and when he left he asked me to keep an eye on his girl du jour, Hilary, for him. Well, when he came back from Spain, Hilary wasn’t his girlfriend anymore. I never did get into the honors thesis class, but that’s how I met your mother. And I’ve never looked back.”

  Sam Grobart nodded, as if in agreement with himself.

  David jerked up. “Dad, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, and fled the room. His father remained in his chair, laughing quietly to himself.

  Patch says good-bye to all that

  Leaving took forever. Everyone was crying, and the whole deck was littered with suitcases and backpacks and purses and gifts. An unusually large number of people whose names Patch couldn’t remember wanted to hug him good-bye, and he went along with it for as long as he could. Finally he had made it to the exit ramp, and was swallowed up in Barker’s arms.

  “Good luck to you, my boy,” he said. “You have been a very special kind of student.”

  “Uh, thanks,” Patch said. “Thanks for everything.”

  “You must keep in touch.”

  “Okay.”

  “Take this,” Barker said, beaming. He handed Patch a very large nonfunctional-looking compass. “So you never lose your way.”

  “Thanks,” Patch said. For a minute, he wasn’t sure what to do with the unwieldy thing, but then he managed to jam it into his bag. He tried to smile, but Patch always had a hard time smiling when he didn’t really mean it. Stephanie came from behind Barker, where she had been hugging some girls good-bye. She was wearing dark glasses.

  She leaned in and kissed Patch on the cheek. “I’ll never forget you,” she whispered.

  “Okay,” he said. Barker kissed Greta on the check, but Stephanie hung behind. And then Patch and Greta walked off the ship and into London.

  “That was a bit much,” Greta said as they stepped onto solid land.

  Greta snuggled up against him in the cab. The rain had stopped, and even though it was cold, the sky was pretty clear. It was dusk, and they were leaving.

  When the cab dropped them at Heathrow, they stood in silence for a moment.

  “So … what flight are you on?”

  “Um,” Patch fumbled with his ticket. “Flight 1541.”

  Greta looked down at her ticket and smiled. “Me, too. I guess I have a layover in New York.”

  “Are you serious? That’s so weird and cool. I get you for a few more hours.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not sitting together.”

  “I’ll just ask them to move you.”

  “From coach to first class? I don’t think they’ll do tha
t.”

  “Come on.”

  They found a ticket agent, and Patch explained their situation. He grinned like he owned the place, sending the girls behind the counter into fits of giggles.

  “I’m sure we can accommodate you,” the agent said, winking bawdily at Greta. “Let’s see … Patch Flood, seat Three-A. It looks like the seat next to yours hasn’t been claimed yet. I’m sure we can make the switch, you’ll just have to wait until boarding time. Just to be sure that passenger doesn’t show up. Why don’t you have a seat in our first-class lounge, right over there.”

  “Thanks,” Patch said.

  “Thank you,” Greta added, still a little bit stunned.

  They found the lounge and sat down. “Um, you want a drink or something?”

  From the other side of the room, someone called, “Is that Patch?” and someone else, “Patch Flood?”

  Patch turned, and there were Mickey and Arno.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Arno asked.

  “Shouldn’t I be asking you guys that?” Patch said softly. “You guys are okay?”

  They both nodded, and then watched in awkward surprise as Greta came up behind Patch, wrapping her arms around him. “Hey …,” she said shyly, “I hope you guys aren’t mad at me for, you know, coming between you.”

  Arno kind of laughed, because a time when that could happen seemed very far away now. “Naw …,” he said as quickly as he could. Everyone stood around awkwardly, until a voice came over the loudspeaker announcing that first-class passengers could board Flight 1541.

  I may actually board an airplane

  The ticket agent at Heathrow looked at me like she was looking through me.

  “You mean you haven’t got your tickets?” she said. “You’re going to have to talk to my supervisor.”

  “But you’re the third person I’ve talked to,” I pleaded.

  The girl shrugged and walked away. I bugged my eyes at Suki, like, “Can you believe this shit?” She looked back at me blankly. All around us was the futuristic echo of arrival and departure, hellos and good-byes.

  I had made her leave my dad’s house before the butler could serve us dinner, so that we could get on the flights home we had booked before the trip began. Of course, we’d left our tickets on the boat, so I knew it was going to be a headache getting us on a plane. I had insisted we get there two hours early. Suki had protested that that really wasn’t her style, but I was adamant. By chance, though, Suki was on the same flight as I was, which was good. We wasted the two hours waiting on various lines and getting nowhere with three different ticket agents. Suki had mentioned several times that she was cranky.

  Eventually, another ticketing person came out. She looked older, and more official, so my hopes rose for a moment.

  “Tickets, please …” she said curtly.

  “Um, we haven’t got them. But look, we’re booked on flight 1541 to New York. I can tell you our seat numbers and—”

  “What do you mean you haven’t got your tickets?”

  “Look, I’ve explained this to three people already …”

  “Don’t get smart with me, young man.”

  Suki elbowed me. I could tell she thought this was funny, and I couldn’t tell whether that or the ticket agent irritated me more.

  “Names …”

  We gave her our names, and she typed for what seemed like an inordinately long time.

  “You don’t have your tickets, and you show up ten minutes before the flight takes off …?”

  The color drained from my face. “We’ve been here for two hours,” I said in a very small voice.

  The agent grunted. “Well, there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Please …”

  “Well, I suppose Miss Davison can board, because she has an e-ticket. But you, lovey, have a paper ticket without which you cannot board.” She sniffed. “Also, due to your lateness, we have given your seat away.”

  “But …” I cursed my mother for being so old-fashioned. She had insisted I buy a paper ticket, the way she insisted I get those useless traveler’s checks.

  The agent started typing again. She raised her eyes slowly to mine. “I can arrange for you to purchase another seat, in coach, next to Miss Davison.”

  “But I never fly coach,” I said, realizing immediately that this sounded pretentious. But honestly, I’ve been flying on upgrades from my dad’s frequent flyer miles since before I can remember, and once you get used to all the leg room in the first-class cabin, it’s really hard to go back.

  “Well, princess, you’re about to find out how the people fly. Passports?” We handed them to her, and she looked them over. “You’ll have to run.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’ll be three hundred sixty dollars, then.” Suki handed over her card, and we waited breathlessly. A few moments later, the machine made an Ehhhh noise.

  “Insufficient funds,” the agent said impatiently.

  “Uh-oh.” I looked at Suki.

  “I guess I finally ran out,” she said. “Those train tickets were kind of expensive.”

  “Ahem,” the agent said, “Miss Davison, if you like, though I don’t advise it, because you have an e-ticket, you could exchange the second leg of your trip, from JFK to SFO, so the young man can fly with you to New York. You’ll have to figure something else out from there, though.”

  “Okay,” I said quickly, and then I whispered to Suki: “When we get to New York, I promise I’ll find a way for you to get home. I promise.”

  “Right,” she whispered, rolling her eyes. Then she told the agent that that was fine. The agent printed our tickets and handed them to us with a good-riddance gesture.

  The airport blurred by us as we hurried to our gate. When we got there, the stewardesses were just about to close the door. They ushered us on, saying, “You’re late! All the way down to your left. You’ll enter at row eleven, go all the way back and take a left and just keep walking.” We hurried through the corridor and into the plane itself. I looked around wildly, thinking maybe, just maybe, I’ll recognize a stewardess or something and they’ll move me up. But the entrance to the plane was in coach, so as we hurried to our seats I didn’t even get a glimpse of the good life.

  The guys are reunited in style

  “Don’t you just love first class?” Sara-Beth Benny was saying as the stewardess handed out mimosas to everyone in the cabin. She had been seated shortly after Mickey, Arno, Patch, and Greta, and she had been talking ever since. Subsequently, none of the guys had really caught up much. “I mean, free drinks for six hours! It’s just like when I go to a bar in New York.”

  Greta was staring at her with her mouth open. She took her mimosa and thanked the stewardess for it excessively.

  “I mean, this is so nice after that awful trip, right? Wasn’t it like the worst,” Sara-Beth went on.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I mean, I don’t think I left my room after that wild party of yours, Patch. I can barely remember a thing about it, which means it must have been good. I woke up with such a headache! And then I just, you know, read magazines in my room as much as possible the rest of the trip. I didn’t I miss anything, did I …?”

  “Not really,” Mickey and Arno said at once.

  “Yeah, the last week or so was mostly tests. But Barker exempted me from all of them, so I had nothing to do,” Patch said. Then he shrugged and continued on to say, as though it were no big deal, “But I had Greta all to myself, so that was cool.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sara-Beth said, oblivious to the fact that Greta was blushing like crazy, and that Arno and Mickey had straightened awkwardly in their seats. “Oh, hey,” she called to the stewardess, swinging around in her seat and waving her empty champagne flute, “could I get another?”

  I fly with the people

  Outside my window, there was nothing but clouds and the occasional peek of ocean. Suki and I had been playing cards for like two hours. The Incredibles was on, but I’d already seen i
t, and besides, in coach you have to pay for earphones, and once again we had no money. I reflected, not for the first time on this trip, how quickly money seems to go when you don’t really have it. Also, Suki had declared the movie “Trash that rots your brain,” even though it still looked funny to me, and that had basically closed the issue.

  One thing that is free, no matter what, on international flights, is drinks. So I ordered us each a Bloody Mary and then we felt much better. We were sort of starting to have fun again, but something had definitely changed. It was like we were sidestepping each other, inasmuch as you can when you are sitting very close to each other in very cramped economy airplane seats and playing gin. Suki wasn’t even really gloating when she scored points. To be honest, I had been thinking about Flan ever since I got this new look into Rob’s life, and I couldn’t really take Suki seriously after that. Maybe she sensed this, somehow. When she won, she smiled at me faintly and said, “Good game.” Then she turned away from me, wrapped herself up in the airplane blanket, and went to sleep.

  I realize I should probably have tried to talk to Suki right then, but I just couldn’t. Instead I waited until I knew she was asleep, and then I went through her bag. I borrowed her bank card and used it to log onto the Internet on the little TV screen in front of my seat.

  Watching the page open, I wasn’t as anxious as usual, but I was filled with a more real kind of worry. Not surprisingly, there was nothing from Flan and one message from David and one from Rob. I decided to face the worst first.

  From: santananumerouno@yahoo.com

  To: jonathanm@gissing.edu

  Dear Jon: I am so apologizing I forgot to send you by e-mail your mother’s number at the ranch. And now I cannot find it, oopsie! But I am sure that with the money I wired, you made it safe to my home in London, and soon will be coming home to New York. I am sure my butler mother you like crazy no? I love that man! New York is crazy. Why did you ever leave?! Your mother hasn’t been back from the ranch yet, but I have been mostly at the Floods house. So much fun there. That girl is so sexy and crazy! She has really taken me to her bosom. –ROB