Dear Edward(54)

This is a joke, but they both get it and don’t bother to smile.

Jane leans her head against his shoulder.

“Where is this guy?” Bruce says.

“He’s probably following the first-class flight attendant around. I think he’s in love.”

“Is she pretty?” He tries to picture the woman and recalls a tight bun of hair but nothing else.

Jane narrows her eyes. “You honestly haven’t noticed?”

He nods at her computer. “Are you almost done with this?” He can hear an accumulated frustration seep into his voice and is disappointed in himself. This response is so pedestrian; he wants to be better, as a husband and a man.

Jane straightens and looks at the screen. At the rows of letters lumped into words, the screenplay format of open spaces and spatterings of dialogue. “No,” she says. “But I will be by the time we land. I promise.”

Veronica has done this twice in her career. It’s nothing she makes a habit of, but she has best practices to execute. She tells Mark to go to the back left bathroom—the one most hidden from sight from the rest of the plane—in ten minutes’ time. After she sees him do this, she turns on the FASTEN SEATBELT sign, to keep as many people as possible in their seats. Then she flips on the overhead speakers at the highest volume, filling the air with a staticky buzz. The head of every waking passenger tips back to look at the ceiling, where the speakers reside. She switches the noise off and ducks into the bathroom.

The dimensions of the room are so small that she and Mark are pressed together immediately. The door lock turns on the fan and light, so they’re doused in fluorescence, a mirror two inches behind her head. The back of Mark’s knees are pressed into the toilet rim. It smells surprisingly fine, though; the air vents are doing their job.

“No talking,” Veronica whispers.

Mark cups the back of her head, his fingers lacing through the bun at the nape of her neck. Veronica gasps a little at her own hunger. She wants to pull the bobby pins out of her hair, but she has to return to work within six minutes or she will definitely be missed, and she must look exactly the same as when she entered the bathroom.

She shimmies her skirt up and shimmies her pantyhose down.

Mark undoes his belt.

There is a tapping noise, not on the bathroom door but from the sides of the plane, and in the back of Veronica’s mind, she thinks, What is that?

Chip, chip, chip, goes the knock, or the air-conditioning unit, or the loose duct, while Mark molds his lips to hers—he’s a surprisingly competent kisser—and she grabs his ass to pull him in.

And then there’s roaring in her head and she’s as red as her lipstick and coursing with everything that makes up life, and when Mark Lassio whispers in her ear, I might need you, she blows the words away like kisses.

Jordan nudges his brother, then leans in close. Their father is still gone.

“What?” Eddie says.

“The first-class flight attendant and a guy just went in the bathroom together.”

Eddie screws around in his seat and looks toward the back of the plane. “Why would they do that?”

Jordan’s laugh is almost a cackle. “To have sex, probably.”

Eddie looks horrified. “In the plane bathroom?”

“I don’t think anyone else noticed. She distracted everyone with that overhead noise, so no one would look.”

“Why did you look?”

“I was counting how many rows of seats were on the plane, so I was facing that way.”

Eddie contemplates this, his face serious. “Maybe he’s sick, and she went in there to help him.”

“Maybe. He looked pretty healthy, though.”

Eddie shudders. “That’s gross.”

“Well, I’m not going to go in that bathroom again, that’s for sure.” Jordan thinks of Mahira and grows hard in his pants. He lowers his tray so his brother doesn’t see.

He notices his dad headed toward them, down the aisle. He thinks of his dad and mom having sex, and the erection dims.

“Still,” Eddie says, in his careful, considered way, “it’s kind of cool to think that having sex is so great that you don’t mind doing it in a bathroom.”

Jordan nods and feels deeply grateful for the comment. Grateful that his brother is beginning to join him in the land of erotic dreams and uncomfortable underpants.

Crispin opens his eyes and doesn’t know where he is. Well, he knows he’s on a plane. That’s obvious. But to where, and when? He’s been on hundreds of flights in his life; there were entire years when he seemed to spend more days in the air, en route to meetings and conferences and lavish vacations, than he did on the ground. He could afford to buy a fleet of these planes if he wanted to, but he’d always refused to fly private. Commercial flights were one of the few places he got to sit among his customers, to observe how they thought and behaved. He’d always considered his time in the airports and on planes to be invaluable market research.

“What year is it?” he asks the woman next to him.

She’s wearing a white cardigan that’s buttoned right up to the top. “Give me your wrist,” she says. “I want to check your pulse.”

“Absolutely not. Answer my question.”

“It’s 2013.”

“I was born in 1936. That means I’m …” He shuts his eyes, but his brain refuses to make the computation. He suspects that this woman is a nurse, probably his nurse.