The big plane was tracing rings around Long Island the way children circle an answer in a picture-book exercise. Over and
over, for a half hour now. A holding pattern.
Leo will be crazy, thought George. The flight was already forty minutes late, and Leo couldn’t stand to wait ten seconds.
George chewed frantically on his Bubble Gum and resisted the temptation to blow a bubble. The plane slowed perceptibly. It
was almost time to switch fantasies. Airplane trips were a continual source of disaster images for George, starting with a
flaming crash on takeoff, through ditching at sea, through running out of fuel during the landing delay —and then an agonizing
earache on descent that left him permanently deaf. It was to avoid this last horror that George chewed the gum. Barbara had
always said —He cut short the thought, concentrated instead on life without hearing. He looked across the aisle, tried to
read the lips of the man and woman sitting there. Impossible. Occasional words came through, but that was all. George felt
like crying. Lost —the world of sound. Forced to read the accompanying sign language on TV laxa
tive commercials, never to be awakened by the perpetual pile drivers that hammered outside his apartment from 7 A.M. on —and never to hear himself applauded at the National Book Award ceremony for author of the Best Novel. Of course, that
wouldn’t happen anyway. That was one fantasy George didn’t have. He was a writer, yes, but a first-rate author, no. An active
imagination was one thing, thought George. Delusions were another.
The rows of lit-up Queens houses were clearly visible out the window now. George was glad it was nighttime; somehow, during
the day, the area looked much bleaker, dismal: large patches where shingles were missing from the roots, forlorn children
looking up and pointing.… But the darkness cloaked everything, reduced the life below to a pretty abstraction. George’s ears
were clogged. In rapid succession he visualized coming down on the Belt Parkway, the plane’s tires blowing out as they touched
the runway, a small, private craft smashing into them as they taxied to the terminal.
“Thank you for flying Pan Am,” announced the stewardess as George unbuckled his seat belt and stood up.
“No matter how many times I fly,” said a man next to him in the slowly moving line of passengers, ”I’m always glad when we
finally get on solid ground.”
“Really?” said George, hearing the man’s voice as if through a faulty long-distance phone connection. ”I never think about
it myself.”
He straggled into the International Arrivals building, holding his trench coat over one arm, and headed for the baggage area.
Fifteen minutes later he was amazed to see his two blue suitcases emerge
on the circular treadmill. He’d expected them to be lost. He snatched each of them up in turn and headed toward the customs
lines. Six separate queues had formed; he ran toward the shortest one. Ahead of him, a black woman in a turban was having
her luggage virtually dissected. The luggage was a disheveled array of cloth sacks and paper bags, and the contents, ranging
from erotic-looking underwear to bunches of bananas, were strewn all over the inspection table. A second officer was called
over, and then a cart was brought, the sacks and bags piled on, and the woman led away. She made no protest, seemed to take
it philosophically. George wondered what had been her crime. Were the bananas illegal? Or was sack-and-bag luggage deemed
improper for anyone entering America?
“Next,” said the inspector.
George placed his suitcases on the table.
“Anything to declare?”
George shook his head. He handed the inspector his blank declaration slip. The man motioned for him to unlock his suitcases.
George fumbled with the keys. Unbeknownst to him, the black woman had managed to slip two kilos of pure heroin into his bags, street value ten million dollars.
Caught, he’d be sentenced to thirty years in federal prison, while authorities announced ”major drug bust.”
“ … been away?”
“Huh?” said George. The customs inspector was looking at him peculiarly.
“I said, how long have you been out of the country?”
“Oh … sorry,” said George. ”My hearing.… Uh, I’ve been out three-and-a-half weeks, not counting the flight.” He grinned.
The inspector remained stern. ”And you have nothing to declare?”
“No.”
“You bought nothing in three and a half weeks?”
George hesitated. He envisioned the hand signal to the second inspector, himself being led away, his luggage in the cart.
”I ran out of toothpaste once,” he said. ”That’s about all.”
The officer ran a meaty hand through the chaos of George’s second suitcase. Without Barbara to pack for him …
“You can close them,” said the inspector tone-lessly.
George nodded gratefully, snapped the lids shut, and headed for the arrival area. He was more than an hour late; Leo would
be apoplectic.
A large crowd had gathered behind a heavy steel railing. George paused and looked around. Suddenly, he heard someone calling.
“George! Hey!”
A medium-height, fortyish man wearing a raincoat pushed his way through the crowd.
“George, over here!”
George stood face to face with his brother, Leo.
“Hello, George.”
“Hello, Leo.”
For a moment, the men just stared at each other. George tried to smile, but found himself holding back tears. Finally, Leo
embraced him tightly. They stood there, hugging amidst the hurrying streams of humanity.
“Watch out for pickpockets,” said George when they had finally separated.
“Always worried,” said Leo. “My big brother always looks out for me. One second back from across the ocean and he’s worrying
about them picking my pockets.”
“You don’t think it can happen? Especially you, you carry your wallet in the back.”
“I have a sensitive ass,” said Leo as they headed toward the exit. “I would feel their fingers. Besides, I keep a plastic
statue of Karl Maiden on my dashboard.”
Outside, the cool night air was refreshing. They trudged across the parking lot. Low flying planes droned overhead.
“I still have some residual hearing,” said George.
“What?” shouted Leo.
“I said I still have some hearing, even after the landing.”
“Well, I don’t!” yelled Leo, as a 727 appeared to land almost on the roof of his Oldsmobile. He opened the trunk and tossed
George’s bags inside. “So what was it like?” he asked.
“What?”
Leo pinched his lips. “What, he says. Playing Johnny-on-the-Pony with Margaret Thatcher. Your trip I’m talking, dummy. Europe.”
“Oh, that.” George was imagining being mugged in the parking lot, then the cops finding the Olds vandalized, torn to shreds,
battery stolen, transmission dropped.…
“How was London?”
George looked up. “Full of Arabs.”
“Yeah, I heard it’s all changed.”
“Not all. The Rosetta stone is still in the British Museum. The Elgin Marbles.”
“Oh sure, yeah, I remember those. I used to play immies myself a little.” Leo laughed, and lightly punched George’s shoulder.
George had spent seven days in London, trying to get the feel of it again, visiting all the tourist places, even just sitting
and feeding the pigeons in Hyde Park. In the end, it was still depressing.
“They say Italy’s gonna close in two weeks,” said Leo as he walked around to the driver’s side of the car, entered, and reached
across the seat to open the door for George. But George remained outside, staring vacantly at the sky.
“Aren’t you gonna get in, George?”
George nodded dazedly.
“That’s why I came to pick you up,” said Leo. “So you could get in.” He started the car, and George opened the passenger side
door and slid inside.
“You lost weight, didn’t you?” said Leo.
George patted his stomach. “A couple of pounds.”
“Sure. Who could eat that lousy food in Paris and Rome?”
George smiled. Leo had no appreciation of food whatsoever, no taste, no discernment. Often, at expensive restaurants, while
everyone around him was ordering chateaubriand and asparagus with hollan-daise sauce, Leo would demand a cheese sandwich and
wolf it down as soon as the waiter brought it.
They headed for the exit of the parking lot, where George insisted on paying the bill.
“My brother the sport,” said Leo.
“Where else for two bucks can you buy eternal gratitude?” said George.
They drove into the maze of roads that crisscrossed the airport. “There!” said George, spotting a sign. “Take that one. It
leads to the Van Wyck.”
Leo nodded. He was a lousy driver, not alert, frequently lost. “So where’d you stay?” he asked.
“Well, in Paris I stayed on the right bank, a small hotel off the Champs Elysées.”
“Nice?”
“Not bad. Except the mattress had a depression like a meteorite had landed. When I woke up after the first night I discovered
I was a quadruped.”
Leo pulled onto the highway. “And Rome?”
“I stayed in a pensione. Also not bad. The bathroom had no toilet paper, but otherwise it was fine. I had an excellent view of the Communist rallies
from my window.”
“I thought I’d take the Belt to the Battery tunnel,” said Leo.
“Take the Van Wyck to the Long Island Expressway,” said George. “This time of night it’s only jammed.”
Leo nodded. “So,” he said.
“So.”
“So d’ja meet anyone interesting?”
“Like who?”
“What do I know like who? The Ayatollah Khomeini.”
“We hit different parties.”
“Then anyone. A person. A girl.” The highway lights flickered off the planes of Leo’s face; he looked like a figure in a silent
film.
“Nope.”
“No girls left in Europe, George?”
“I didn’t see any.”
“Did you look?”
“All I saw were a lot of guys who needed shaves.”
Leo exhaled sharply. “I think you could have used a vacation on your vacation, George.”
“Don’t rush to judgment. Inside, I’m a new man.”
“You look tired.”
“It was too expensive to sleep there.”
They passed the American Airlines terminal, where a small crowd had gathered in front. “Glad I’m not part of that,” said George. “Arrive in the middle of the night and first have to fight your way into a cab.” He shook his head. “Terrible.
I feel sorry for those people.”
“They’re paying for past sins,” said Leo. “They didn’t think to arrange adolescent victimizing by younger brothers, so that
those same guilty siblings would later in life feel compelled to pick them up at airports.”
“You mean you’re here out of thirty-year-old guilt?”
“Certainly. What then? Even though it wasn’t my fault that I was the loved one, while you were only the smart one.”
“I always thought you were the smart one. Maybe your grades didn’t show it, but on intelligence alone, down deep, I knew you were tops.”
“You should’ve told my teachers that.”
“I’m planning to write them tomorrow,” said George.
“Oh, nice,” said Leo. “Maybe they’ll change my marks.” They were on the Van Wyck Expressway now, moving north through the
center of Queens.
“So all in all, it sounds like you had a pretty good time,” he added.
“I had a shit time,” said George.
“That’s what I said. It sounds like you had a lousy trip.”
“Ah, the whole thing was foolish,” said George. “I should’ve known before I started.”
“Known what? I thought the idea was to get away, take some time for yourself, not visit the same places you went to with …
you know …”
George turned to face him. “Barbara. Her name was Barbara. You’re allowed to say her name, Leo.”
“All right. Barbara. Anyway, why didn’t you go to Norway or Sweden? They got no ugly girls there, they send them to Finland.”
“The worst thing would’ve been to go to Europe looking for girls,” said George.
Leo shrugged. “I’m not sure I follow that, but I’ll accept it if you say so.”
“I was doing perfectly fine till I got to Rome,” said George. “In Paris, I even saw a woman throw up right on Napoleon’s coffin.
The guard fined her two francs on the spot for ’fouling zee tomb.’ I was doing really well, and then one night I took a walk
in one of the piazzas, and I saw a middle-aged couple kissing near a fountain. Can you imagine? My age, and they were kissing
in the street.”
Leo stared straight ahead out the windshield.
“That’s when I got angry with Barbara,” George continued. “I mean furious. I said, how dare she go and die on me? How dare she! I would never do that to her.”
“I can imagine what—”
“You can’t imagine, Leo. You really can’t. I was like a nut, walking up and down the Via Veneto, cursing my dead wife.”
“In Italy they probably didn’t pay attention,” said Leo.
“In Italy, they agree with you,” said George.
• • • •
Back at the American Airlines terminal, among the people who weren’t being met by guilty siblings, was Jenny MacLaine, returning
from her divorce. Thirty-four years old, pretty, in a drained, pale sort of way, she stood next to her friend, Faye Medwick,
in the line wating for a cab.
“Taxi!” called Faye musically. “Yoo-hoo, here. Taxi!”
“It doesn’t work that way,” said Jenny. “You just have to wait in line for them. It’s not like in the streets.”
“I’d like to wait in line, if I could only find it,” said Faye. “At this point, a line would look good to me.”
“There’s a cab shortage,” said a man standing in front of them.
“Really?” said Jenny. “I guess I better stock up.”
“Job action by the drivers,” continued the man. “Supposed to last only one day.”
“That makes me feel wonderful,” said Jenny.
Faye tapped her on the shoulder. “Should we stop off at a grocery? Your refrigerator’s probably empty.”
Jenny shook her head. “I dropped an order off with Gristedes before I left.”
“Before— You’re having them raise a cow for you?”
“They were supposed to deliver the order this morning. We’ll soon see…”
A cab pulled forward, but the man in front of them, instead of entering, held open the door. “Ladies.…”
“You’re kidding,” said Jenny.
“I’ll get the next one,” he said, smiling.
Jenny and Faye smiled back. “I’ll be dipped,” said Faye. They entered the taxi, and the man slammed the door.
“You’re a gentleman and a sweetheart,” said Faye out the window as the cab pulled away.
“Ask him if he’s married,” whispered Jenny loudly.
The cab driver turned his head. “Chwhere to, ladies?” He was a Latin with pockmarked skin and several gold teeth.
“Twenty-first and ninth,” said Jenny. “Manhattan.”
The driver narrowed his eyes. “Chwhere’s tha’?”
“You don’t know where Manhattan is?”
“Oh chure, I know. It’s the other part.”
“Just get us to Manhattan first,” said Jenny. “Well direct you from there.”
“I still can’t believe it,” said Faye. “You fly two thousand miles to get a divorce and you remember to leave a grocery order?”
“It’s that Catholic upbringing. I majored in discipline.”
Faye pulled out a small mirror and began to redo her makeup. Faye was always redoing her makeup. When she was done, she found Jenny star
ing out the window. “You don’t look any different,” she said.
“Well, your features don’t actually cha. . .
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