And so—certainly not proud of herself, but not precisely disgusted either—she showered, slipped into a pair of tight, come-hither jeans and a white blouse that was perfect for the last Saturday night in July, and went out into the dark. She wore the shade of lipstick the airline preferred for her, a deep scarlet that would help the hearing impaired read her lips in the event of an emergency.
* * *
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Was she too old to have kicked off her heels and danced barefoot on a floor sticky with spilled beer in a dark club in the East Village, courting a noise-induced hearing loss because the band’s amps were set to jet engine? Probably. But she wasn’t the only woman who was suddenly barefoot. She was merely the oldest. And she didn’t care about her age or her feet, because she was doing this sober and that left her unexpectedly pleased. This was the foolishness the heart craved. She’d found a bar with a band and a party, it was still the middle of summer, and the people were beautiful. She was nowhere near Dubai. The guy she was dancing with, an actor with Gregg Allman hair, honey-colored and lush, had just finished doing six weeks of Shakespeare in Virginia. He said he was thirty-five and was here because one of the dudes on the stage that moment had been in a show with him that spring in Brooklyn. The musical had needed someone who could play the guitar as well as sing and act.
“You’re sure I can’t get you a beer?” he shouted into her ear. His name was Buckley, which she had told him was the best name ever for a Shakespearean actor, and he had agreed, but he was from Westport and that was the name he got—and it hadn’t been a great name when he was doing a musical about the 1970s punk scene last year at the Public. And Buck, he had reminded her, was far worse: if you were a performer named Buck, you were either a cowboy or a porn star.
“Positive!” she reassured him. She jumped and spun and had both of her hands over her head, the bass from the stage thrumming inside her, and then Buckley’s fingers were on the small of her waist, pulling her into him, and when she brought her hands down she rested them on the back of his neck and suddenly they were kissing and it was electric.
When they were at the bar catching their breath a few minutes later, she asked one of the bartenders, a young thing in a tight denim shirt and straight black hair that fell to her waist, to bring him a shot of tequila.
“Oh, man, I shouldn’t,” he said, laughing, his cheeks flushed, but he took the small glass.
“Of course, you should,” Cassie told him. “It’s well after midnight.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Witching hour.”
He took one of the drapes of his hair and pushed it back behind his ear. “Seriously?” He had asked the question sincerely, as if he expected he was about to learn something. It was almost sweet.
Still, she was surprised at his reluctance to go from tipsy to drunk. It was a shot of tequila. One shot. They weren’t talking about heating a spoonful of crack. She expected more from an actor, even one who had grown up in Fairfield County, Connecticut. She was holding her shoes, and she put them down on the seat of the empty barstool near them. Then with one hand she reached out and took a rope of that magnificent mane of his, not at all surprised at how soft it was. With the other she took the small glass she’d ordered for him and swallowed the shot of tequila. The burn was deep and hot and seemed to ooze out from her chest like an oil spill. It was heavenly. So much for not drinking tonight.
“And yet you passed on the beer,” he said, smiling. His grin was childlike, his eyes impish.
“I like tequila.”
“But not beer.”
“I’m a flight attendant, remember? The uniform is unforgiving.”
“Do airlines still worry about weight? Can they do that?”
“It’s vague. Weight must be proportional to height. But you really can’t do your job if you’re fat. I’ll be in the gym again tomorrow.”
“Because you fly?”
“Because I’m vain.”
“Tell me the craziest thing you’ve ever seen.”
“As a flight attendant?”
“Yes. You hear stories that are just insane.”
She nodded. She honestly couldn’t say whether flying made people weird, or whether people were inherently weird and a closed cabin just made it more apparent.
“You hear them,” she said. “We live them.”
“I know! Tell me some. Tell me one.”
She closed her eyes and saw Alex Sokolov in the bed beside her. She saw once again the deep, wet furrow across his neck. She saw herself crouched against the drapes in the hotel room in Dubai, naked, his blood on her shoulder and in her hair.
“You should have a shot, first,” she said.
“That bad?”
“I’ll have another one with you.” She slipped her shoes back on, trying not to focus on how filthy her feet had become, and took his hand and led him to the bar. She wasn’t going to share with him the tale of the young hedge fund manager who had died in the bed beside her on the Arabian Peninsula. There wasn’t enough tequila in the world to get her to tell him that nightmare. And so instead, as they dared each other to keep downing shots—a second, a third, a fourth—she told him of the passengers who had tried to open exit doors at thirty-five thousand feet and the couples who honestly believed they were being discreet when their hands were under the blankets while the rest of the cabin was asleep. She told him of the man who had tried to climb over the beverage cart—he got as far as one knee on the top and his foot on the bag of ice on the shelf—because he wanted to get to the bathroom and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) wait.
She shared with him her encounter with the rock star who purchased the entire first-class cabin for himself and his entourage: “I wasn’t allowed to speak to him. I had to whisper the drink and menu options into his bodyguard’s ear. I wasn’t even allowed to make eye contact with him. The flight was an overnight to Berlin and he didn’t sleep a wink. Even though the lights were dimmed and his party was sound asleep—his bodyguard, too—he went into the lavatory and changed his clothes three times, each outfit more outrageous than the one before it. For about an hour and a half he was in a gold sequin jumpsuit and platform heels, and his only audience was me.”
She told him the different locales on the plane where they tended to stow the tough cuffs, and the different occasions when she had needed them to restrain a passenger.
And then she told him about Hugo Fournier. She wasn’t sure he would know the name, but he would know the story. He probably presumed it was an urban legend. But it wasn’t. She’d been there. She’d been on the flight.
“So, we’re flying from Paris to JFK. It’s a route I bid on a lot. I was younger then and so I got it less often. This was eight years ago. And when I got it, I usually had business class.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“No, it’s just that sometimes it can be a difficult cabin. On some aircraft, in first everyone has a flat bed and is out like a light pretty soon into the flight. In coach, there’s really not a whole lot you ever have to do. But business has thirty-two seats and there’s almost the same cabin service as first. And they sleep less. So, some flight attendants feel it’s a little less desirable, which means that whoever’s working in it might have less seniority.”
“Okay.”
“So, this particular flight is packed. Not a single empty seat. Maybe an hour west of Ireland, when we’re on dessert in business, this guy who has been flying with the airline forever pushes past me to get to the chief purser, who is working in first. He is oozing adrenaline, and the idea crosses my mind that there is some mechanical disaster. I literally think, an engine is on fire. No more than thirty seconds later, I hear the chief purser on the intercom asking if there is a doctor or nurse on board. She sounds pretty cool, but I hear just a quiver of desperation. Of course, I’m also relieved th
at we’re not about to ditch in the ocean.”
“Of course.”
“There is a doctor. There are, in fact, two. One in coach and one in business, and they both rush to seat twenty-four E, where Hugo Fournier, old and diabetic and obese, has just had a massive heart attack. The doctors, one female and one male, and the flight attendants lay him out on the floor in front of the galley and emergency exit row, because that’s where they can find the most room. They get out the defib and work on the guy, and they work him hard. The doctors try everything, and they don’t call it for at least forty minutes. Everyone in the cabin knows what’s going on. His wife is freaking out. She is shrieking and pleading and crying. Can you blame her? It’s not a dignified performance, but it’s a real one.”
“God…”
“Yup. But now we—you know, the crew—have to do something with the body. We can’t put him back where he was. He’s in the middle of economy and while those are the cheap seats, people still don’t expect to sit next to a corpse. Plus, he’s covered in vomit, and while we could clean that off his shirt and pants, we couldn’t clean off the stench. And the body did what bodies do when they die. Poor Hugo Fournier had crapped his pants.”
Buckley put his hands on his face and shook his head. “I do know this story.”
“Of course you do.”
“You put him in the bathroom for the rest of the flight.”
“Well, I didn’t. But, yes, the crew did. I actually lobbied that we try and get one of the people in first to give up their flat bed, but our chief purser wouldn’t have it. I suggested we put him in one A or one L, so almost no one would see him or smell him. But she wouldn’t even ask. So, yes, one of the doctors and two of the male flight attendants wedged him into the starboard, midcabin lavatory. The doctor—a pretty judgmental guy, in hindsight—said it was like getting a size ten foot into a size eight shoe.”
“And you didn’t turn around.”
“The plane? No. We were already over the mid-Atlantic. We didn’t want to inconvenience two hundred and fifty-eight people. And so instead we inconvenienced one. She just happened to be a widow. A loud widow.”
“Amazing.”
“Or appalling.”
“You got that Scheherazade thing down,” he said.
“Most of us are pretty good storytellers,” she agreed. “We are the kings and queens of the degrading.”
“Where did you say you just flew in from? I can’t remember.”
“I didn’t say.”
“Okay, then: where?”
Such a simple question. It demanded but a one-word answer. Two syllables. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to say it right now: it would be like waking in the middle of the night in a dark room and switching on klieg lights. “Berlin,” she lied. She was prepared to embellish the trip, if she had to. If it came to that. But it didn’t.
“And you still like the job?” he asked.
She rolled back her head, lolling in the heaviness that came with the fourth shot. Perhaps because she’d just lied, she felt an acute need to admit something—to give him something real. The need to confess was irresistible. “When you start as young as I did—right out of college—it’s usually because you’re running from something. You just have to get out. To get away. It wasn’t a career change for me. It wasn’t even a choice, in some ways. It was just a road somewhere.”
“An escape?”
“You could say that.”
“From?”
They were sitting down now and it was a quarter to one. They were on stools side by side at the bar, but they were facing each other. She reached over and hooked her fingers just inside the front pockets of his jeans, locking him gamically to her. His eyes had the fuzzy drunk stare she liked. She wouldn’t have been surprised if hers were a little loopy, too.
“There’s a town at the edge of the Cumberland Mountains in Kentucky called Grover’s Mill. Pretty quaint, right?”
“Whereabouts?”
She shook her head and purred, “Shhhh,” her voice the wind in the night. Then: “I’m Scheherazade.”
He nodded.
“It’s small and quiet,” she continued. “Not a lot happens there. Imagine a girl in sixth grade with strawberry blond hair. It’s up in a bun because she fancies herself a dancer and she does nothing in moderation. Never has and, alas, never will.”
“This is you.”
“So it would seem. And today is her birthday. And while Grover’s Mill doesn’t have much, it has a creamery that makes ice cream. Really good ice cream, at least this eleven-year-old thinks so. And so her mom has a big idea for her birthday, because they really can’t afford a whole lot in the way of presents and her birthday has fallen smack in the middle of the week, and so there sure as hell isn’t going to be a party. Of course, there probably wouldn’t have been a party even if her birthday had fallen on a Friday or a Saturday, because you just didn’t dare bring kids over to the house on the weekend, because that was usually when Dad was most likely to get seriously and impressively hammered. Anyway, Mom goes to the creamery and buys a tub of her daughter’s favorite flavor.”
“Rum raisin?”
“Cute. But, no. Chocolate chip cookie dough. And she buys her daughter a two-gallon tub. Do you how many pints that is? Sixteen. She stops by the creamery on her way home from work—she’s a receptionist at this creepy electrical wire factory in this otherwise forgotten ghost town next door to Grover’s Mill—and buys this restaurant-size two-gallon tub of ice cream. Just so you know, the girl’s birthday is in September and it was one freaking hot September that year. You can look it up.”
“I trust you.”
She dug her fingers a little deeper into his pants pockets, kneading the flesh of his thighs ever so slightly. “So Mom has all this ice cream in a bag, along with some groceries, in the trunk of her car. She’s going to get home just about the same time as her husband. Her eleven-year-old kid is already home, a kind of classic latchkey little despot. She has a kid sister who’s eight, but that day the kid sister was at her weekly Brownie meeting. Their father was picking her up on his way home from the high school where he was a P.E. coach and driver’s ed teacher. As Mom is nearing the street where her family lives, she sees a police car. It’s maybe a quarter mile from her house. It’s parked, but its lights are on. And then she sees her daughter.”
“You.” Even in that one syllable, she could hear the slight catch in his throat as she teased him through the thin strip of fabric that comprised the inside of his pants pocket.
“No, silly. That eleven-year-old is home, remember? She sees the eight-year-old. The child is still wearing her Brownie sash with all of these very colorful badges. And then she sees her husband’s crappy Dodge Colt. Robin’s-egg blue. A hatchback. And it’s wrapped around a telephone pole. She stops, absolutely terrified, her heart sinking. But thankfully no one’s injured. Her little girl is stunned, scared, but mostly fine. A couple of bruises on her arm. And her husband? He’s in the backseat of the police cruiser. Handcuffed. Drunk. So she follows the police car to the police station and uses all the money in their pathetic little savings account at their pathetic little bank to bail him out. This takes a while.”
“Of course it does.”
“And by the time she gets home with her drunk of a husband and their adorable Brownie of a daughter…by the time they pull into the driveway and pop the trunk…all that ice cream for the older girl’s birthday is gone.”
He reached down and lifted her fingers from his pockets and held them tenderly in his hands. “Someone stole the ice cream? At the police station?”
“Nope. It melted. It melted through the cardboard tub and then through the paper bag. Some of it seeped into the fabric of the trunk and some of it just sloshed around the back of the car like the fluid inside a snow globe.”
“God, that’s so
sad.”
She raised an eyebrow. Sharing with him the moment hadn’t made her sad at all. It actually had made her rather happy. It was something to get off her chest. It was a memory from a place she’d never, ever see again. She looked at the other bartender, a young guy with a string of silver piercings the length of his ear on the other side of Buckley. She gazed at the neon signs for beer and the white lights over the ice trays behind the thick mahogany counter, and she found herself smiling.
“Nah,” she said to him. He was gently rubbing the part of her hand between her thumb and her index finger. “Sad is when the Easter Bunny comes on a Monday. That was way worse.”
“How is that possible?”
She hesitated. Just how much could she wallow in this before it really would ruin their buzz? But then she decided that she didn’t care and plowed ahead. “The Easter Bunny arriving the day after Easter? One year my grandfather had a stroke and my mom had to race to the hospital in Louisville. She was gone the Friday and Saturday before Easter, then Easter Sunday and Monday. And my dad just…just didn’t cope. The good news? With all the chocolate and jelly beans on sale the next day—you know, half and two-thirds off—he bought my sister and me a hell of a lot more candy than the Easter Bunny was ever going to bring.”
Buckley lifted her hands and kissed her fingertips.
“So,” she said. “Are we going to my place or yours?”
* * *
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In the morning she awoke and saw a strip of the Empire State Building through the vertical blinds of her bedroom window. She sensed Buckley beside her in bed, and for a moment she held her breath to listen. She recalled initiating their retreat to his place or hers at the bar, viewing it as a dare of sorts: regardless of where they wound up, she wanted to see if she had become some sort of alcoholic assassin as forty neared, and suddenly she was killing the men with whom she slept. It had been a private challenge of sorts, a deliberate provocation of the soul.