Window Seat Confessional (This Had Never Happened Before)
Note: Some language and themes in this story are not suitable for younger readers.
When it was all over, so much of it had never happened to Roger before. Yet it began with something he always did.
Roger found his seat on the airplane – 22F – and he took it. He sat, as was his custom, next to the window. Roger was a man entering middle age, but he still craved the window seat.
Roger was still enthralled by his first experience of flying alone. He'd been seven, in the window seat, and traveling from his home in Houston to his cousin’s family in upstate New York. There was little he could remember from the visit with his extended family, other than a vague notion they'd visited some lodge nestled in the Poconos.
But Roger could recall in heightened color every detail from his first airline flight. He could recall all its moments, and how he’d spent them all gazing through a foam of clouds at the criss-crossed land of towns and farms below. Ever since, finagling a window seat to study the distant earth below was one of Roger's two preoccupations with air travel.
As soon as he buckled himself into 22F, Roger pursued his second preoccupation.
He turned his attention to the stream of passengers lurching like cattle down the plane's aisle, and he waited.
Without exception, when flying Roger always fantasized about sitting next to some wedding ring-free, gorgeous stranger. It never happened. This troubled Roger because his job required a lot of flying. So, it seemed to him a statistical surety that he would have sat – at some point – next to the stranger of his fantasy. But, no go.
Roger wondered why this was so. Was God mocking him because his desire was so pathetic and base? Was Roger simply too hard on women and how they looked? Roger, honestly, had no clue, but what he did know was that his last flight had been a dead-on accurate representation of Rogers's whole experience with the matter.
He'd been on a flight to Chicago, and as he studied his fellow passengers boarding the plane, he’d tracked no less than three beautiful women who all seemed about to settle in beside him.
It was embarrassing to admit, but each time one of the three was heading his way, Roger's pulse had quickened, he'd whispered a prayer, and he’d feared for the smell of his breath.
Each of them ended up sitting a row or two away from Roger. They became moons arrayed around the planet of his seat – so near and visible, but never destined to touch.
Instead of the fulfillment of his longing, Roger ended up with a fat man in a Kansas State t-shirt. The man's girth was dammed in, at least slightly, by the armrest between their seats. Roger's purple-shirted seatmate was a nice enough guy (he really enjoyed selling truck parts), but for the duration of the flight Roger was unable to shake his nagging disappointment. He knew his disappointment was juvenile, but that did not make it any less real.
So, in the present moment, as he sat in seat 22F, Roger gave up on his fantasy. This cold resignation, even in a matter so trivial, had never happened to him before. Roger had always been a positive thinker and a successful doer, often the envy of his friends in both cases.
But now he crossed into new territory and turned his attention to the inflight magazine. He sighed, and, eventually, a woman sat next to him. She had a haircut so short and unfortunate it made Tinkerbell's hair look shaggy. She also wore a wedding ring on her finger and a sneezing baby on her lap. Roger looked out the window, the plane took off, the view was nice, and he fell asleep. For how long he didn't know.
Body odor awakened Roger.
There was no other way to describe it. He was asleep, and then he was suddenly, unpleasantly awake, and the sole reason for this transfer from the subconscious state to the conscious was B.O. This also had never happened to him before.
Was it his stench? No, certainly not. Was it the nearly bald woman beside him? Surprisingly, no. Perhaps her child? Even more unexpectedly, the answer was still no.
So, torn between the competing desires to know the source and yet not be noticed during his investigation of the odor, Roger sniffed about unobtrusively, even nonchalantly (if such a thing is possible) until he located his target.
The source turned out to be sources, an infernal teamwork between Roger's headrest and the window itself. Roger's nose informed him that they were working in tandem to pinch his head with stink.
It didn't make sense at first, but then, Roger figured it out. Hundreds of greasy heads had leaned back into his headrest and hundreds of greasy temples pressed upon his plastic window pane. And the airline had never adequately scrubbed things clean.
Roger shuddered. He wiped things down as well as he could with the little, meaningless napkin he’d received with his cup of ginger ale. It was an impotent gesture in the face of the smell, quite like pouring a glass of water into a volcano.
For a moment Roger considered calling for the flight attendant and asking for something more stout to battle the stench. But in the end Roger decided against this approach. If he pursued it, the flight attendant would naturally think Roger himself was the source. This seemed just a bit worse than the current situation.
So, Roger just basted in the smell and waited to land.
Finally they did. The plane was late into Kansas City, and Roger had a very quick turnaround before his next flight to San Francisco. He’d have to hustle to have any chance of making his final connection. Roger exited the plane and immediately engaged the airline attendant tasked with telling connecting passengers where to go next.
"Which gate for San Francisco?" Roger asked.
"Good news, sir. You're already there. Or here. Or whatever. This is the gate. You have the same plane. No hurry. Take it easy. Go and grab some food."
Relief flooded Rogers's mind. After the seatmate misfortune and the body odor at least some small thing had gone his way.
Roger stretched, went to the nearby mini-store, picked out a pack of Rolos, and waited his turn in the line for the cashier. It was at that moment the full reality of the situation hit him, and his relief became terror.
In booking his tickets online two months earlier Roger had done something he’d never done before. Roger had elected to purchase seat 22F for both legs of his flight. At the moment of purchase, this seemed persuasively convenient to him. But now, standing with a pack of candy in his suddenly sweaty palm, Roger realized he had guaranteed himself nothing less than a bath in body odor for both legs of his flight.
There was nothing he could do. His was the dull despair of the walking dead. Roger paid, had his ticket scanned by the gate agent, clung to his snack, and re-entered the plane. The whole scenario felt to him like a Greek tragedy, albeit a minor one.
Roger took a deep breath and held it as he crept into 22F. When his lungs finally gave out and he breathed, Roger was dumbfounded; he simply didn't know what to make of his blessing.
The body odor was gone.
While he’d been standing in line and gnashing his teeth, the Lord had sent some janitor to disinfect his seat and window. All that was left to smell was a wisp of vanilla and the acrid smell of disinfectant. Roger was amazed by his reprieve, but this victory instantly became a prologue to a greater triumph.
The stranger he had longed to see for decades sat down beside him. It happened without build-up or fanfare or the need to beseech all gods, deities both false and true. She had been directly behind him in the boarding line. Roger had been numb and blind to her presence, consumed as he was with his fears of seat 22F.
But there she was, and it was simply amazing because she was simply amazing. Her sitting beside him was like the incarnation of a cliché, the physical manifestation of some bromide like "it's always darkest before the dawn" or "let your deepest desire fly free, and if it returns to you, then it was truly meant to be yours."
Roger turned to his seatmate and said, "Hi." She returned the greeting and began to flip through the Sky Mall magazine.
It sounded absurd to Roger, even as he first thought it, but she looked like the piney woods of East Texas were he'd been raised. Her skin was a deep brown like the trunk of a healthy tree. Her hair was the ruddy color of the innumerable pine needles carpeting the forest. And, almost as if she were in on the joke about her resemblance to his hometown woods, the woman had chosen a rich green for the color of her eye shadow.
Cataloguing these attributes in his mind as fast as his eyes took them in, Roger knew they shouldn’t work together in concert. On paper, the stranger should be an odd looking woman. In the flesh they did work, and the overall effect was fantastic. Through his peripheral vision he took the rest of her in. Her ankles and toes were covered in bangles and rings, but her ring fingers were bare. Roger sat stunned.
The plane took off, and Roger decided to go for it. He told her his name and how he liked her leg jewelry. She told him her name and thanked him for the compliment.
She said the jewelry was a fetish she'd developed in college but, since it was too noisy for work, she could only indulge in it when going on a vacation like she was now.
Roger asked her what she did for work and where she was going for vacation. She told him she was a civil rights lawyer and she was on her way through San Francisco to Honolulu. Then it was Roger's moment to go for it.
"Don't take this the wrong way," he said. "Don't take this the wrong way at all, but I am thirty-seven years old, and I have a confession to make. You see, ever since I’ve known what girls and airplanes were, I’ve dreamed of flying somewhere and sitting next to a perfectly beautiful woman. It never happened… until now." Roger only stammered twice getting it all out. All things considered, he felt reasonably smooth.
She turned to him, leaned in slightly, and smiled out of the left half of her mouth. It was a conspirator's smile. In exaggerated fashion, she looked to the left and then to the right. Then she looked deeply and directly into Roger's face.
"Me too," she said. "I must say that I myself have had that same sort of fantasy for years. And, that's not all. You know what?"
"What?" he said.
"Since you confessed something to me, I will confess something to you."
"OK," he said, and she began.
"I drive down my street on my way home from work, and like almost every single day – and I mean every single day – I see one of my neighbors out getting her mail. I know her a little. She's nice. Has a cute dog. And there she is, fishing around in her mailbox every afternoon wearing this kimono-ish bathrobe thing. Now she's got one foot on the curb and one foot out in the street. And, it's like, I always turn my wheel just a hair to the left to give her more room. It's not like I’m close to hitting her anyway, but that's just what you do, right?
“So, here's the confession: pretty much every blasted day I have the same thought as I pass her. I think about what it would be like to turn the wheel to the right and just plow the hell into her.
“Now I nevernevernever would. And, anyway, like I said, I like the woman. But I think it. And some days, and I don't know why it's these days and not others, it's almost like there's this force pushing my hands to the right and saying, ‘Do it! Why not see what happens?’ Anything like that ever come over you?"
There was this pause, and then she laughed long and hard and with such deep richness that as Roger listened to it he realized he'd never wanted anyone more deeply in his entire life.
He said, "Yes. Yes, it has."
They began to talk, and they continued to talk all the way through drink service with hardly a break to breathe. For Roger, each word shared back and forth between them was a brick, and the bricks constructed a temple, and in that temple he praised God for the undeserved glory of life.
Finally, she said that, although she was about to be full-out vacationing in Hawaii, she needed to get some work done in order to feel truly free from the chains of the office. Roger lied and said he understood.
She responded by taking a stapled hunk of paper out of her bag. Roger responded to her response by focusing his visual attention on the land below, but all the while Roger’s spiritual attention was focused upon prayer. Roger prayed for another way into her, another opportunity to engage.
Grace was abundant. Apparently, the angel who had sanitized his seat returned to do his bidding once more. Trying to wiggle the staple free from her paperwork, she poked her index finger.
"Oh, fu...mblebum!" she said while looking at him with wide, apology eyes. "Almost let an F-bomb fly right there. So sorry."
Roger took the opening. "No fucking worries. Your thumb going to survive?" They both laughed.
She said, "I guess over the years I have developed a pretty strong preference for paperclips over staples."
"I am very, very sorry, but I disagree,” Roger said. “And I’ll be pissed off if you do not give the staple the full measure of respect it deserves.” Roger felt himself flushing with the rush of how easily the words were coming to him while he sat beside her.
"Huh?" she asked.
"The staple, you see, is real commitment. Now I guess the paperclip holds things together all right. I guess it does the job – weakly, but the paperclip is really just screwing around and playing games. It's easily removed. The papers can just slip out with hardly any effort or trouble or conflict at all. Like so many things today, the paperclip is just too easy-going and weak on commitment.
“Now that is not the case with the staple. The staple punctures those papers. The staple clamps them together pretty much for good. It hurts to take the staple out. It leaves a scar.
“The staple, you see, is marriage. The paperclip is just dating. The paperclip is, ultimately, just fucking around. I find that the more our culture has rejected the traditional models of serious commitment, the more the paperclip has replaced the staple for our paper-fastening needs. In essence, the ascendancy of the paperclip represents all that is wrong with the modern American family."
Roger rambled all in an affected, mock serious tone, and she received it in the same fashion – narrowing her eyes, pressing her lips together, nodding as if in deep thought while he spoke. She even stroked her chin once or twice.
When Roger reached his conclusion, she allowed for a brief pause, and then said, "You, my Roger, are a very wise man, a modern Solomon... And that is sarcasm, in case you never learned to recognize it."
All Roger could think about while he watched her fingers move across her chin was that she’d applied the pronoun my to his name.
Roger's ears started to hurt, and his emotions morphed instantly into panic. The pain meant the plane was beginning to descend. They would be landing soon. He felt his stomach go squishy with nerves, and he knew he needed to go to the bathroom, but he couldn't afford to waste his remaining time with her.
He fought off his bowels, they settled, and he began to feel a little giddy again. The giddiness mixed with his desperation to form a dangerous stew, and Roger decided to take his conversation with her in a direction he’d never before truly contemplated pursing with a real woman.
Now Roger was not an ugly man. Nor was he stupid. He was not a virgin, and a few times over the years Roger had even needed to fight off the sexual overtures of a few females he wasn’t interested.
But Roger did not talk easily to women. He talked far more easily in his mind to the fabricated women of his imagination. In the laboratory of his head he imagined countless possible conversations and scenarios. Maybe all men were like this to some degree, but Roger surely was more like this than most.
And through the years of cycling and recycling these imaginary conversations with fictitious women, Roger had come up with a pick-up line, or more like a pick-up paragraph, so preposterous and yet brilliantly conceived that any woman's response to it would tell you exactly where you stood with her. You see, the response (theoretically) told you with pinpoint accuracy whether or not you would soon roll into a bed with her.
The paragraph was only to be used after developing rapport. Its supreme oddness was guaranteed to catch the woman by surprise, and so she would respond with unvarnished honesty.
If she responded with disdain to the story presented by the paragraph, things were hopeless with her. If she responded with compassion towards you for your role in the story, things were moving along well. If she offered compassion to you but also picked up on the sexual undertones in the story, well, then it was obvious how nicely things were going and would be going deep into the night.
Roger had never dared to use the approach in the real world before, but this had been a day of first experiences, both glorious and horrific. So he elected to pull the trigger.
"Excuse me," Roger said.
"Sure," she replied.
Roger went for it. "We kinda began our trip together with confessions. I wanted to make one more, if that’s good with you."
"Why not?" She smiled.
"Thanks." Roger took a deep breath. "Now I love my Mom. God rest her soul. I love my Mom. She's passed already, I don't know if I'd mentioned that...Well, anyway, when I was growing up she spanked me. A lot. Actually, to put it literally, she paddled me. She did it so much, and she so hated to be inconvenienced by me, or anything really, that Mom would stash ping pong paddles all over the house.
“She had one in the magazine rack beside her knitting chair in the living room. She had one on the backyard patio table bookended by citronella candles. I think she even had one stashed in a homemade holster underneath the dining table.
“So, the short of it is, anywhere and at any time, if I violated whatever rules of behavior she had for me...SWAP! To the back of the head or to my butt cheek or the meat of my upper arm. But never the face. Even Mom had her limits. And I hated it.
“But I guess, in another way, I kinda have come to like paddles, at least a little and in a certain way….
“Anyway, thanks for letting me get that off my chest. I've never told anyone that before."
The last sentence of the speech had been true, but the rest of it was a complete lie. And now Roger sat there looking at her for some clue about how she’d react so he sat there looking at her. He sat there not believing he had finally said this thing. It was obviously a truly horrible and stupid thing to say. That was clear to him now that he had actually used his breath and lips to give it birth into the world outside of his head.
Finally she responded. "No shit, Roger! Noooo shit! My Mom did exactly the same thing. Amazing! Can’t believe it. Just can’t believe it."
He’d never anticipated this response. Suddenly he found himself left with the language found on elementary school playgrounds. Roger said, "Did not!"
"Did to!" she said.
"Did not!" Roger said again, louder this time.
They went back and forth with this a few more times, and then her face collapsed in on itself with sorrow. "Roger, why are you making this so hard on me?"
"Huh? What? Oh God, unbelievable. I guess it's possible," he said.
"Guess it's possible?!?! Roger, who made you the arbiter of whether or not the pain of my childhood is reality?"
"No, no, that's not what I mean. I'm sorry. Really."
Her face popped out again, and she grinned. "Got you! Got you bad! Real bad!.... And where did you get that god-awful, low-brow, child-abusey, s&m-lite story. I know it didn't happen to you. I can't prove my case on that, but don't try to convince me otherwise. I’m a lawyer. I’ve got great instincts with stuff like that. I’ve got a great internal bs meter."
Roger took a moment to regain his footing, and then he said, "All right. Here's the real confession, the real secret. I heard that story in church. It was a story in a sermon on, of all things, how to better love your children. It was all in an actual sermon except for the sex-tinged part at the end. I threw that in there to see if you’d take the bait. "
"Sounds like a pretty terrible sermon."
"Pretty much," he said.
"You go to church, to worship," she asked.
"Yep. Every week. Can't imagine my life without it. Without Jesus. Without all of it."
"Me too," she said.
“Bullshit. I’m not letting you do that to me again. I’m calling ‘bullshit.’"
She stood her ground. "No, really. And, it may be shameful to admit these things in times like these, but I am a practicing Christian. Baptized. Confirmed. I commune every week. And, get this, I even tithe, and give a little more on top of that."
His eyes widened. "Ten percent of your money to God? To a church’s ministry? I’m impressed."
"At least ten percent."
Roger told her she was starting to break down his distrust, but he wasn't yet fully convinced she was Christian.
She said she understood. Then she said, "Maybe this will convince you. This is a song from the church camp I counseled at last summer."
She cleared her throat, wiggled in her seat a little to get comfortable, and then in a good voice she sang the following words far too loudly for a space as small as an airline cabin: Who’s the King of the Jungle? (Hoo-hoo) / Who’s the King of the Sea? (Bubble, bubble, bubble) / Who’s the King of the Universe? / Who’s the King of Me? / J-E-S-U-S!
“Oh, I love church camp,” Roger replied. “Loved it as a camper; love it as a counselor. You know, I make good money at my job, but I am at heart a pretty useless man. Most of the skills I’ve acquired over the years, I learned from church camp. The essential skills cultivated to curry favor from adolescents gathered around a swimming pool during free time.
“Consider this,” he said, “I can squirt water a great distance using only the cupped palms of my hands. I can belch long strings of words. I can do lots of stuff like that. Now none of that really helps sell organic pet products throughout the continental U.S., but still….”
“Don’t be ashamed,” she said. “Because of church camp, I can tell a good ghost story and fart on command.”
The wheels touched the runway, and the plane started taxiing to the gate. It was now or never. Roger spoke quickly and with force, "Congratulations on all that. Really. I mean that. Command farting is truly impressive.
“But, look, I never say things like this, but please shave a day or two off you Hawaii trip. Stay with me. I want to be with you, and we’ve only been talking for a few hours, but I'm afraid I'll never see you again if I don't ask you this and if you don't say yes. I have never wanted someone more than you right now. Please stay with me. Or let me come with you. I don’t care, but something. Something."
She looked legitimately caught off guard. "I can't, Roger. I can't."
"Can’t? Why not? Is it a moral thing? A Christian spiritual conviction kind of thing?"
"Roger, I'd like to say it was something like that because that sounds very noble, but it's not that. Roger, and this is totally true, I'm a lesbian. I’m interested in women. No joke. No shit…God, I’m such an idiot. Like you don’t know what ‘lesbian’ means.
“But, anyway, if it weren’t that way, then it would be nice. But that’s the way it is, so it can’t be."
He didn't know what to say. He said something, of course he did. And then she said something, and he said something, and they closed their time together amicably.
But, although he adequately navigated a few more moments of awkward talk, Roger was frozen, locked into his seat, utterly confused and heartsick. The cabin doors opened, and the stream of impatient passengers began to flow out, but still Roger sat in 22F immobile, both inside and out.
Before she stood, entered the queue, and departed the plane, she touched him on the forearm. "Please pray for me," she said. He nodded yes, and then she was gone.
Roger stared out the window and without blinking he watched men in orange jackets unload and abuse suitcases taken from the belly of the plane. As he stared, and without his mind ordering him to do it, Roger felt his lips begin to move soundlessly.
Roger found himself praying, praying for her and for himself and for something new to begin within him because he suddenly knew his life had become stale and untenable.
Yet mainly he prayed for her as she had asked him to do.
This had never happened to Roger before. Many times people had asked for his prayers, and he’d agreed to offer them. Many other times Roger had taken the initiative and told others in distress that he would pray for them, and they had been touched and grateful.
Never before had he actually done it. Never before had Roger actually stopped his life and prayed for the person who’d asked him to do so. Until now.
Was this spiritual impulse the new, fresh thing in his life for which he prayed? Was God so tricky that God would answer his prayer with the prayer itself? Was God so tricky that God would send him a lesbian so he could fall in love and begin his life anew?
Roger didn’t know. How could he? Just a few minutes before his life seemed to him in no need of revision. However, even he knew some life changes come with the slowness of ice ages and others the quick ferocity of lightning strikes.
Time passed. The plane became hollow, empty of its passengers, and quiet except for the plane’s own eternal high-pitched hum.
After waiting as long as she could without getting in trouble for the delay, a cleaning lady asked Roger politely to leave the aircraft.
Roger looked at her, and he did not see an airline maid. He saw an angel with a rag in one hand and a can of disinfectant in the other. He saw a messenger of the Lord preparing to perform a miracle for the next person to sit in the window seat.
Roger found his seat on the airplane – 22F – and he took it. He sat, as was his custom, next to the window. Roger was a man entering middle age, but he still craved the window seat.
Roger was still enthralled by his first experience of flying alone. He'd been seven, in the window seat, and traveling from his home in Houston to his cousin’s family in upstate New York. There was little he could remember from the visit with his extended family, other than a vague notion they'd visited some lodge nestled in the Poconos.
But Roger could recall in heightened color every detail from his first airline flight. He could recall all its moments, and how he’d spent them all gazing through a foam of clouds at the criss-crossed land of towns and farms below. Ever since, finagling a window seat to study the distant earth below was one of Roger's two preoccupations with air travel.
As soon as he buckled himself into 22F, Roger pursued his second preoccupation.
He turned his attention to the stream of passengers lurching like cattle down the plane's aisle, and he waited.
Without exception, when flying Roger always fantasized about sitting next to some wedding ring-free, gorgeous stranger. It never happened. This troubled Roger because his job required a lot of flying. So, it seemed to him a statistical surety that he would have sat – at some point – next to the stranger of his fantasy. But, no go.
Roger wondered why this was so. Was God mocking him because his desire was so pathetic and base? Was Roger simply too hard on women and how they looked? Roger, honestly, had no clue, but what he did know was that his last flight had been a dead-on accurate representation of Rogers's whole experience with the matter.
He'd been on a flight to Chicago, and as he studied his fellow passengers boarding the plane, he’d tracked no less than three beautiful women who all seemed about to settle in beside him.
It was embarrassing to admit, but each time one of the three was heading his way, Roger's pulse had quickened, he'd whispered a prayer, and he’d feared for the smell of his breath.
Each of them ended up sitting a row or two away from Roger. They became moons arrayed around the planet of his seat – so near and visible, but never destined to touch.
Instead of the fulfillment of his longing, Roger ended up with a fat man in a Kansas State t-shirt. The man's girth was dammed in, at least slightly, by the armrest between their seats. Roger's purple-shirted seatmate was a nice enough guy (he really enjoyed selling truck parts), but for the duration of the flight Roger was unable to shake his nagging disappointment. He knew his disappointment was juvenile, but that did not make it any less real.
So, in the present moment, as he sat in seat 22F, Roger gave up on his fantasy. This cold resignation, even in a matter so trivial, had never happened to him before. Roger had always been a positive thinker and a successful doer, often the envy of his friends in both cases.
But now he crossed into new territory and turned his attention to the inflight magazine. He sighed, and, eventually, a woman sat next to him. She had a haircut so short and unfortunate it made Tinkerbell's hair look shaggy. She also wore a wedding ring on her finger and a sneezing baby on her lap. Roger looked out the window, the plane took off, the view was nice, and he fell asleep. For how long he didn't know.
Body odor awakened Roger.
There was no other way to describe it. He was asleep, and then he was suddenly, unpleasantly awake, and the sole reason for this transfer from the subconscious state to the conscious was B.O. This also had never happened to him before.
Was it his stench? No, certainly not. Was it the nearly bald woman beside him? Surprisingly, no. Perhaps her child? Even more unexpectedly, the answer was still no.
So, torn between the competing desires to know the source and yet not be noticed during his investigation of the odor, Roger sniffed about unobtrusively, even nonchalantly (if such a thing is possible) until he located his target.
The source turned out to be sources, an infernal teamwork between Roger's headrest and the window itself. Roger's nose informed him that they were working in tandem to pinch his head with stink.
It didn't make sense at first, but then, Roger figured it out. Hundreds of greasy heads had leaned back into his headrest and hundreds of greasy temples pressed upon his plastic window pane. And the airline had never adequately scrubbed things clean.
Roger shuddered. He wiped things down as well as he could with the little, meaningless napkin he’d received with his cup of ginger ale. It was an impotent gesture in the face of the smell, quite like pouring a glass of water into a volcano.
For a moment Roger considered calling for the flight attendant and asking for something more stout to battle the stench. But in the end Roger decided against this approach. If he pursued it, the flight attendant would naturally think Roger himself was the source. This seemed just a bit worse than the current situation.
So, Roger just basted in the smell and waited to land.
Finally they did. The plane was late into Kansas City, and Roger had a very quick turnaround before his next flight to San Francisco. He’d have to hustle to have any chance of making his final connection. Roger exited the plane and immediately engaged the airline attendant tasked with telling connecting passengers where to go next.
"Which gate for San Francisco?" Roger asked.
"Good news, sir. You're already there. Or here. Or whatever. This is the gate. You have the same plane. No hurry. Take it easy. Go and grab some food."
Relief flooded Rogers's mind. After the seatmate misfortune and the body odor at least some small thing had gone his way.
Roger stretched, went to the nearby mini-store, picked out a pack of Rolos, and waited his turn in the line for the cashier. It was at that moment the full reality of the situation hit him, and his relief became terror.
In booking his tickets online two months earlier Roger had done something he’d never done before. Roger had elected to purchase seat 22F for both legs of his flight. At the moment of purchase, this seemed persuasively convenient to him. But now, standing with a pack of candy in his suddenly sweaty palm, Roger realized he had guaranteed himself nothing less than a bath in body odor for both legs of his flight.
There was nothing he could do. His was the dull despair of the walking dead. Roger paid, had his ticket scanned by the gate agent, clung to his snack, and re-entered the plane. The whole scenario felt to him like a Greek tragedy, albeit a minor one.
Roger took a deep breath and held it as he crept into 22F. When his lungs finally gave out and he breathed, Roger was dumbfounded; he simply didn't know what to make of his blessing.
The body odor was gone.
While he’d been standing in line and gnashing his teeth, the Lord had sent some janitor to disinfect his seat and window. All that was left to smell was a wisp of vanilla and the acrid smell of disinfectant. Roger was amazed by his reprieve, but this victory instantly became a prologue to a greater triumph.
The stranger he had longed to see for decades sat down beside him. It happened without build-up or fanfare or the need to beseech all gods, deities both false and true. She had been directly behind him in the boarding line. Roger had been numb and blind to her presence, consumed as he was with his fears of seat 22F.
But there she was, and it was simply amazing because she was simply amazing. Her sitting beside him was like the incarnation of a cliché, the physical manifestation of some bromide like "it's always darkest before the dawn" or "let your deepest desire fly free, and if it returns to you, then it was truly meant to be yours."
Roger turned to his seatmate and said, "Hi." She returned the greeting and began to flip through the Sky Mall magazine.
It sounded absurd to Roger, even as he first thought it, but she looked like the piney woods of East Texas were he'd been raised. Her skin was a deep brown like the trunk of a healthy tree. Her hair was the ruddy color of the innumerable pine needles carpeting the forest. And, almost as if she were in on the joke about her resemblance to his hometown woods, the woman had chosen a rich green for the color of her eye shadow.
Cataloguing these attributes in his mind as fast as his eyes took them in, Roger knew they shouldn’t work together in concert. On paper, the stranger should be an odd looking woman. In the flesh they did work, and the overall effect was fantastic. Through his peripheral vision he took the rest of her in. Her ankles and toes were covered in bangles and rings, but her ring fingers were bare. Roger sat stunned.
The plane took off, and Roger decided to go for it. He told her his name and how he liked her leg jewelry. She told him her name and thanked him for the compliment.
She said the jewelry was a fetish she'd developed in college but, since it was too noisy for work, she could only indulge in it when going on a vacation like she was now.
Roger asked her what she did for work and where she was going for vacation. She told him she was a civil rights lawyer and she was on her way through San Francisco to Honolulu. Then it was Roger's moment to go for it.
"Don't take this the wrong way," he said. "Don't take this the wrong way at all, but I am thirty-seven years old, and I have a confession to make. You see, ever since I’ve known what girls and airplanes were, I’ve dreamed of flying somewhere and sitting next to a perfectly beautiful woman. It never happened… until now." Roger only stammered twice getting it all out. All things considered, he felt reasonably smooth.
She turned to him, leaned in slightly, and smiled out of the left half of her mouth. It was a conspirator's smile. In exaggerated fashion, she looked to the left and then to the right. Then she looked deeply and directly into Roger's face.
"Me too," she said. "I must say that I myself have had that same sort of fantasy for years. And, that's not all. You know what?"
"What?" he said.
"Since you confessed something to me, I will confess something to you."
"OK," he said, and she began.
"I drive down my street on my way home from work, and like almost every single day – and I mean every single day – I see one of my neighbors out getting her mail. I know her a little. She's nice. Has a cute dog. And there she is, fishing around in her mailbox every afternoon wearing this kimono-ish bathrobe thing. Now she's got one foot on the curb and one foot out in the street. And, it's like, I always turn my wheel just a hair to the left to give her more room. It's not like I’m close to hitting her anyway, but that's just what you do, right?
“So, here's the confession: pretty much every blasted day I have the same thought as I pass her. I think about what it would be like to turn the wheel to the right and just plow the hell into her.
“Now I nevernevernever would. And, anyway, like I said, I like the woman. But I think it. And some days, and I don't know why it's these days and not others, it's almost like there's this force pushing my hands to the right and saying, ‘Do it! Why not see what happens?’ Anything like that ever come over you?"
There was this pause, and then she laughed long and hard and with such deep richness that as Roger listened to it he realized he'd never wanted anyone more deeply in his entire life.
He said, "Yes. Yes, it has."
They began to talk, and they continued to talk all the way through drink service with hardly a break to breathe. For Roger, each word shared back and forth between them was a brick, and the bricks constructed a temple, and in that temple he praised God for the undeserved glory of life.
Finally, she said that, although she was about to be full-out vacationing in Hawaii, she needed to get some work done in order to feel truly free from the chains of the office. Roger lied and said he understood.
She responded by taking a stapled hunk of paper out of her bag. Roger responded to her response by focusing his visual attention on the land below, but all the while Roger’s spiritual attention was focused upon prayer. Roger prayed for another way into her, another opportunity to engage.
Grace was abundant. Apparently, the angel who had sanitized his seat returned to do his bidding once more. Trying to wiggle the staple free from her paperwork, she poked her index finger.
"Oh, fu...mblebum!" she said while looking at him with wide, apology eyes. "Almost let an F-bomb fly right there. So sorry."
Roger took the opening. "No fucking worries. Your thumb going to survive?" They both laughed.
She said, "I guess over the years I have developed a pretty strong preference for paperclips over staples."
"I am very, very sorry, but I disagree,” Roger said. “And I’ll be pissed off if you do not give the staple the full measure of respect it deserves.” Roger felt himself flushing with the rush of how easily the words were coming to him while he sat beside her.
"Huh?" she asked.
"The staple, you see, is real commitment. Now I guess the paperclip holds things together all right. I guess it does the job – weakly, but the paperclip is really just screwing around and playing games. It's easily removed. The papers can just slip out with hardly any effort or trouble or conflict at all. Like so many things today, the paperclip is just too easy-going and weak on commitment.
“Now that is not the case with the staple. The staple punctures those papers. The staple clamps them together pretty much for good. It hurts to take the staple out. It leaves a scar.
“The staple, you see, is marriage. The paperclip is just dating. The paperclip is, ultimately, just fucking around. I find that the more our culture has rejected the traditional models of serious commitment, the more the paperclip has replaced the staple for our paper-fastening needs. In essence, the ascendancy of the paperclip represents all that is wrong with the modern American family."
Roger rambled all in an affected, mock serious tone, and she received it in the same fashion – narrowing her eyes, pressing her lips together, nodding as if in deep thought while he spoke. She even stroked her chin once or twice.
When Roger reached his conclusion, she allowed for a brief pause, and then said, "You, my Roger, are a very wise man, a modern Solomon... And that is sarcasm, in case you never learned to recognize it."
All Roger could think about while he watched her fingers move across her chin was that she’d applied the pronoun my to his name.
Roger's ears started to hurt, and his emotions morphed instantly into panic. The pain meant the plane was beginning to descend. They would be landing soon. He felt his stomach go squishy with nerves, and he knew he needed to go to the bathroom, but he couldn't afford to waste his remaining time with her.
He fought off his bowels, they settled, and he began to feel a little giddy again. The giddiness mixed with his desperation to form a dangerous stew, and Roger decided to take his conversation with her in a direction he’d never before truly contemplated pursing with a real woman.
Now Roger was not an ugly man. Nor was he stupid. He was not a virgin, and a few times over the years Roger had even needed to fight off the sexual overtures of a few females he wasn’t interested.
But Roger did not talk easily to women. He talked far more easily in his mind to the fabricated women of his imagination. In the laboratory of his head he imagined countless possible conversations and scenarios. Maybe all men were like this to some degree, but Roger surely was more like this than most.
And through the years of cycling and recycling these imaginary conversations with fictitious women, Roger had come up with a pick-up line, or more like a pick-up paragraph, so preposterous and yet brilliantly conceived that any woman's response to it would tell you exactly where you stood with her. You see, the response (theoretically) told you with pinpoint accuracy whether or not you would soon roll into a bed with her.
The paragraph was only to be used after developing rapport. Its supreme oddness was guaranteed to catch the woman by surprise, and so she would respond with unvarnished honesty.
If she responded with disdain to the story presented by the paragraph, things were hopeless with her. If she responded with compassion towards you for your role in the story, things were moving along well. If she offered compassion to you but also picked up on the sexual undertones in the story, well, then it was obvious how nicely things were going and would be going deep into the night.
Roger had never dared to use the approach in the real world before, but this had been a day of first experiences, both glorious and horrific. So he elected to pull the trigger.
"Excuse me," Roger said.
"Sure," she replied.
Roger went for it. "We kinda began our trip together with confessions. I wanted to make one more, if that’s good with you."
"Why not?" She smiled.
"Thanks." Roger took a deep breath. "Now I love my Mom. God rest her soul. I love my Mom. She's passed already, I don't know if I'd mentioned that...Well, anyway, when I was growing up she spanked me. A lot. Actually, to put it literally, she paddled me. She did it so much, and she so hated to be inconvenienced by me, or anything really, that Mom would stash ping pong paddles all over the house.
“She had one in the magazine rack beside her knitting chair in the living room. She had one on the backyard patio table bookended by citronella candles. I think she even had one stashed in a homemade holster underneath the dining table.
“So, the short of it is, anywhere and at any time, if I violated whatever rules of behavior she had for me...SWAP! To the back of the head or to my butt cheek or the meat of my upper arm. But never the face. Even Mom had her limits. And I hated it.
“But I guess, in another way, I kinda have come to like paddles, at least a little and in a certain way….
“Anyway, thanks for letting me get that off my chest. I've never told anyone that before."
The last sentence of the speech had been true, but the rest of it was a complete lie. And now Roger sat there looking at her for some clue about how she’d react so he sat there looking at her. He sat there not believing he had finally said this thing. It was obviously a truly horrible and stupid thing to say. That was clear to him now that he had actually used his breath and lips to give it birth into the world outside of his head.
Finally she responded. "No shit, Roger! Noooo shit! My Mom did exactly the same thing. Amazing! Can’t believe it. Just can’t believe it."
He’d never anticipated this response. Suddenly he found himself left with the language found on elementary school playgrounds. Roger said, "Did not!"
"Did to!" she said.
"Did not!" Roger said again, louder this time.
They went back and forth with this a few more times, and then her face collapsed in on itself with sorrow. "Roger, why are you making this so hard on me?"
"Huh? What? Oh God, unbelievable. I guess it's possible," he said.
"Guess it's possible?!?! Roger, who made you the arbiter of whether or not the pain of my childhood is reality?"
"No, no, that's not what I mean. I'm sorry. Really."
Her face popped out again, and she grinned. "Got you! Got you bad! Real bad!.... And where did you get that god-awful, low-brow, child-abusey, s&m-lite story. I know it didn't happen to you. I can't prove my case on that, but don't try to convince me otherwise. I’m a lawyer. I’ve got great instincts with stuff like that. I’ve got a great internal bs meter."
Roger took a moment to regain his footing, and then he said, "All right. Here's the real confession, the real secret. I heard that story in church. It was a story in a sermon on, of all things, how to better love your children. It was all in an actual sermon except for the sex-tinged part at the end. I threw that in there to see if you’d take the bait. "
"Sounds like a pretty terrible sermon."
"Pretty much," he said.
"You go to church, to worship," she asked.
"Yep. Every week. Can't imagine my life without it. Without Jesus. Without all of it."
"Me too," she said.
“Bullshit. I’m not letting you do that to me again. I’m calling ‘bullshit.’"
She stood her ground. "No, really. And, it may be shameful to admit these things in times like these, but I am a practicing Christian. Baptized. Confirmed. I commune every week. And, get this, I even tithe, and give a little more on top of that."
His eyes widened. "Ten percent of your money to God? To a church’s ministry? I’m impressed."
"At least ten percent."
Roger told her she was starting to break down his distrust, but he wasn't yet fully convinced she was Christian.
She said she understood. Then she said, "Maybe this will convince you. This is a song from the church camp I counseled at last summer."
She cleared her throat, wiggled in her seat a little to get comfortable, and then in a good voice she sang the following words far too loudly for a space as small as an airline cabin: Who’s the King of the Jungle? (Hoo-hoo) / Who’s the King of the Sea? (Bubble, bubble, bubble) / Who’s the King of the Universe? / Who’s the King of Me? / J-E-S-U-S!
“Oh, I love church camp,” Roger replied. “Loved it as a camper; love it as a counselor. You know, I make good money at my job, but I am at heart a pretty useless man. Most of the skills I’ve acquired over the years, I learned from church camp. The essential skills cultivated to curry favor from adolescents gathered around a swimming pool during free time.
“Consider this,” he said, “I can squirt water a great distance using only the cupped palms of my hands. I can belch long strings of words. I can do lots of stuff like that. Now none of that really helps sell organic pet products throughout the continental U.S., but still….”
“Don’t be ashamed,” she said. “Because of church camp, I can tell a good ghost story and fart on command.”
The wheels touched the runway, and the plane started taxiing to the gate. It was now or never. Roger spoke quickly and with force, "Congratulations on all that. Really. I mean that. Command farting is truly impressive.
“But, look, I never say things like this, but please shave a day or two off you Hawaii trip. Stay with me. I want to be with you, and we’ve only been talking for a few hours, but I'm afraid I'll never see you again if I don't ask you this and if you don't say yes. I have never wanted someone more than you right now. Please stay with me. Or let me come with you. I don’t care, but something. Something."
She looked legitimately caught off guard. "I can't, Roger. I can't."
"Can’t? Why not? Is it a moral thing? A Christian spiritual conviction kind of thing?"
"Roger, I'd like to say it was something like that because that sounds very noble, but it's not that. Roger, and this is totally true, I'm a lesbian. I’m interested in women. No joke. No shit…God, I’m such an idiot. Like you don’t know what ‘lesbian’ means.
“But, anyway, if it weren’t that way, then it would be nice. But that’s the way it is, so it can’t be."
He didn't know what to say. He said something, of course he did. And then she said something, and he said something, and they closed their time together amicably.
But, although he adequately navigated a few more moments of awkward talk, Roger was frozen, locked into his seat, utterly confused and heartsick. The cabin doors opened, and the stream of impatient passengers began to flow out, but still Roger sat in 22F immobile, both inside and out.
Before she stood, entered the queue, and departed the plane, she touched him on the forearm. "Please pray for me," she said. He nodded yes, and then she was gone.
Roger stared out the window and without blinking he watched men in orange jackets unload and abuse suitcases taken from the belly of the plane. As he stared, and without his mind ordering him to do it, Roger felt his lips begin to move soundlessly.
Roger found himself praying, praying for her and for himself and for something new to begin within him because he suddenly knew his life had become stale and untenable.
Yet mainly he prayed for her as she had asked him to do.
This had never happened to Roger before. Many times people had asked for his prayers, and he’d agreed to offer them. Many other times Roger had taken the initiative and told others in distress that he would pray for them, and they had been touched and grateful.
Never before had he actually done it. Never before had Roger actually stopped his life and prayed for the person who’d asked him to do so. Until now.
Was this spiritual impulse the new, fresh thing in his life for which he prayed? Was God so tricky that God would answer his prayer with the prayer itself? Was God so tricky that God would send him a lesbian so he could fall in love and begin his life anew?
Roger didn’t know. How could he? Just a few minutes before his life seemed to him in no need of revision. However, even he knew some life changes come with the slowness of ice ages and others the quick ferocity of lightning strikes.
Time passed. The plane became hollow, empty of its passengers, and quiet except for the plane’s own eternal high-pitched hum.
After waiting as long as she could without getting in trouble for the delay, a cleaning lady asked Roger politely to leave the aircraft.
Roger looked at her, and he did not see an airline maid. He saw an angel with a rag in one hand and a can of disinfectant in the other. He saw a messenger of the Lord preparing to perform a miracle for the next person to sit in the window seat.