The Flight Attendant(10)

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They were held at the gate and lost their on-time departure. She hadn’t seen a conga line on the runway, but the minutes ticked by. Then the captain told the crew and then he told the passengers the reason for the delay: thunderstorms across the eastern Mediterranean and southern Europe. They would be here perhaps half an hour. She tried to believe this was the case, that all that was holding them up was the weather. But her anxiety only grew more pronounced. Still she worked. She and Megan brought the first-class cabin drinks and more drinks, and then they brought them mixed nuts they warmed in the ovens. The passengers in economy could only suffer in silence and fret that they would miss their connections at Charles de Gaulle. Cassie would glance out the windows, half expecting to see police vans converging upon the plane from the tunnels that snaked underneath the airport. She would pause before the front cabin door, fearing there was someone on the other side signaling her to open it, open it right now—there in her mind was the captain, emerging from the flight deck, nodding, giving her permission—because airport security was about to pull somebody off the plane. Occasionally she checked her phone to see if there were news stories of a hedge fund manager from America found dead in a Dubai hotel room, but there seemed to be nothing on Twitter or any of the news sites—at least the English sites that she could Google and read.

Finally the jet bridge was retracted and Stewart instructed them to make sure that the cabin was prepared for takeoff. He said it was time to strap in. They began their taxi, and then they were rolling down the runway and she felt the shimmy that suggested they were seconds from wheels up, and then they were. They were climbing, airborne, and they were leaving Dubai. They were, once more, leaving behind the indoor ski resort, the massive, man-made marinas in the shape of palm trees you could see from space, and the skyline with its towering, futuristic needles. The vending machines that sold gold. They were soaring over the endless rows of oil wells and oil rigs—from the sky, they looked like industrious black ants chained in place to the ground—and then the desert, endless, flat, and unfurling in waves and ripples and hillocks to the western horizon.

And with that came the tears. They were as unexpected as they were unstoppable, and she allowed them to slide down her face and muck up her mascara. She cried silently, aware that none of the passengers could see her here in her jump seat. Megan might look over and wonder at what a hot mess she had become, but Megan had flown with her enough to know that she would rally. She cried, she guessed, in some small way because she was so deeply relieved: she was leaving the Arabian Peninsula, where it was hard enough to be a woman and probably a disaster if you were a woman that men believed had nearly decapitated some poor money manager in an inexplicable fit of arak-fueled postcoital madness. But she was crying mostly, she realized, out of grief and sorrow and loss. Now that the self-preservation that had gotten her this far had begun to dissolve, she thought about the man she had left behind, and for the first time—the shock evaporating like the morning haze she’d recall as the sun would rise over the Cumberland Mountains—she began to feel the despair that walks hand in hand with bereavement.

She made a litany in her mind of the little she knew of Alex Sokolov’s personal life: He was an only child. His parents in Charlottesville were starting to toy with the idea of retirement, though it was still a good ways off. (God, that only reminded her of how young he was: his parents had yet to retire.) He said he had been with the fund nearly four years—and that’s what he called it whenever it came up, “the fund”—and before that he’d worked for Goldman Sachs. But he had worked in money management since getting some sort of master’s in math—quantitative something and finance something—in Durham. (In the same way that he only offered the name of his employer when she asked, he only said Duke when she pressed for more details.) He preferred Tolstoy and Turgenev to Dostoevsky, but encouraged her to reread all three writers “as an adult, instead of as a student pulling an all-nighter.”

He had not simply gotten them a table for two at the French bistro a couple of blocks from his hotel, he had paid off the ma?tre d’ to seat them in a corner and not seat anyone else at the table beside them. At first she’d viewed the move as pretentious male swagger, but as they were approaching their table he had whispered into her ear that he viewed romance as a totally private matter, and he wanted to romance her that night. Later he would pick up a tab that dwarfed what she usually spent over three nights in Paris and Dubai; it was more than she spent most months on groceries. He had ordered the blanquette de veau and she had ordered the coq au vin, joking that after all the arak they had consumed, it only made sense for her to eat chicken in wine (though of course, he reminded her, the alcohol would have cooked away). They had enjoyed their meal, savoring the seclusion, and taken their time. They finished a bottle of wine and then ordered still more arak. And yet despite how far down the alcohol rabbit hole they fell there, they never lost sight of the fact they were in Dubai. They both had been here before and knew that the penalties for public drunkenness were not pretty. The two of them were far from raucous. They flirted in their own little alcove, but didn’t touch. He kept his voice low as he told her the things he wanted to do to her in his hotel room once he joined her there. He slid his room key across the tablecloth, and she shivered ever so slightly when their fingertips touched.

When the police would follow his credit card to the restaurant, people would recall he had been with a woman who was likely from America because the two of them had spoken English like Americans. Someone might recall that she was older than he was. But had they stood out? A bit, yes, because they had indeed ordered arak and wine and then more arak. But she was confident that at least half, perhaps even two-thirds, of the diners in the restaurant were Westerners. They hadn’t made a scene.