did not!!!
Bullshit!
I swear to God it happened!
Was he still cute?
Sort of, I guess…we were both sooooo drunk….
I could hear the squealing and the laughter…and there I’d be, the big punch line on hen night….
I stood up. It’s not an easy thing to do in an airplane toilet with a woman wrapped around you, but fury gives you strength you never imagined you could have. She gasped with shocked pleasure, or maybe it was pleasured shock, and then I turned and completed this ridiculous deed up against the bathroom door, bumping her against it with as many thrusts as it took to finish myself off.
By this time she’d stopped saying my name, switching instead to “They’ll hear us! They’ll hear us!”
I knew it would bother her. That’s why I did it. Anything to get her to stop repeating my name.
Her feet found the floor. She pushed herself away from me, shoved her hair back, and began to dress.
“Mickey,” she hissed, “why did you do that?”
“The angle on the toilet bowl wasn’t working for me.”
“We were banging against the door!”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“What if somebody heard us?”
“What could they do? Stop worrying.”
She wanted to be mad at me but the whole thing had been her idea, so she probably didn’t feel entitled to her anger. Beyond that, I’m sure she felt lonely. I know I did. We were two semi-naked strangers in a chemical toilet high in the sky, and that’s as lonely as lonely gets.
I peeled off the condom, knotted it, and dropped it in the receptacle for used paper towels.
“Is that the best thing to do with that?”
She was worried about evidence. Typical lawyer.
“Nobody’s going to inspect the garbage,” I said. “Look, I’ll drop some paper towels over it. See? It’s buried.”
There were tears in her eyes. I touched her cheek, forced a smile. “Listen. That was nice…. You come okay?”
She blinked back the tears, blushed, nodded. “Several times, in fact.”
“Good.”
“How do we…get out of here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, who goes first?”
“It really doesn’t matter.”
“You came in here after me. If somebody saw you, it might look funny if I go out first.”
“I’ll go first, then.”
“What if somebody’s waiting right outside to use the toilet? I’ll be in here when they come in!”
“So I guess we’ll just stay here for the rest of the flight, huh?”
I was trying to loosen her up, but it wasn’t working. She was worried. The champagne buzz had faded, and the gleeful aspect of the experience had totally evaporated. Now she wanted her respectability back, as badly as she’d thought she wanted sex ten minutes earlier.
“I’ll go first,” she decided. “I’ve got the window seat. I’d have to climb over you if you went first.”
“That’s very logical of you.”
She looked at herself in the mirror and took a deep breath before hopping out of the bathroom as if she had a parachute on her back.
I locked the door after her, sat on the toilet seat and buried my face in my hands. I thought about spending the rest of the flight in here, but the chemical stink would have killed me.
How many women had I tasted since “Sweet Days” hit the charts? The answer was a blur, like trying to count snowflakes in a blizzard. Unlike snowflakes, the women were all alike, except for one, the one who’d inspired the song. Sadly, she wasn’t the one I’d married.
She was the one who ran away and broke my heart. Things were getting better, though. Twenty years on, I didn’t think about her more than once or twice an hour.
A tap on the bathroom door—it was a flight attendant, asking that I please return to my seat and put my seat belt on, as the captain was anticipating turbulence.
I put my jeans on and went back to my seat. When I got there she was fast asleep with her head against the window, the airline blindfold over her eyes, a blanket tucked up under her chin.
Pretty smart. She was going to pretend it had all been a dream. She slept the rest of the way to JFK, greeting me cordially when she awoke.
Fine with me. I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, too. It would be easier all around.
We got off the plane and walked together down a long ramp toward the luggage carousel. She had baggage to pick up but I had nothing but my carry-on bag, so this was a perfect departure point. We stopped walking and shook hands, as if one of us had just sold life insurance to the other.
“It was really nice meeting you,” I said, well aware that the verb in that statement was a lot milder than it could have been.
She seemed to appreciate it, though. She hesitated before handing me a card.
“If you ever want to get together,” she said, leaving the sentence incomplete as she turned and headed for the carousel.
I watched her go, then looked at the card. Rosalind Pomer, Attorney at Law. Now I knew her name.
It was well past midnight in New York. I was exhausted in every way a body and soul can be exhausted. I couldn’t just show up at my parents’ house, unannounced and reeking of a sky hump. I decided to check into one of those cheap airport motels, the ones you drive past and wonder who in their right mind would stay in dumps like those.
It was only forty-eight bucks for the night, tax included. For the first time in ages I was rolling in money, plenty of money, so I paid in cash. They gave me a boxy room near the ice machine in the hallway, and between the clunking of the ice cubes and the roar of planes it wasn’t a particularly restful night.
But there was a good strong shower, and I must have stood beneath its hot spray for twenty minutes, scrubbing away paint stains, Rosalind Pomer, and, I hoped, all the sins I’d committed in the City of Angels.
CHAPTER TWO
I slept late, almost late enough to be charged for another day. It was Sunday afternoon, just past two P.M. I got dressed, packed up, and went to the front desk to check out. The pathetic rubble of a complimentary breakfast was available if I wanted it, coffee in Styrofoam cups
