The Flight Attendant(19)

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.



* * *



? ?

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.