God he hadn’t seemed to notice me. He sat in the second row, and by the stricken expression of the stewardess, hurrying back down the aisle this second with the Thermos of precious coffee, he hadn’t mended his ways during the night. I caught her eye and communicated sympathy into her, woman to woman, as best I could. She returned a small nod and continued down the aisle. The chewing gum was turning stale and hard. The wrapper had gone missing somewhere. I tore off a corner of page fourteen of Life magazine, folded the scrap, and slipped the wad discreetly inside.
In the seat next to mine, a gentleman looked up from his newspaper. He was tall and lean, almost thin, a loose skeleton of a fellow, and he’d made his way aboard with a small leather suitcase, climbing the stairs nimbly, the last in line. I hadn’t paid him much attention, except to note the interesting color of his hair, a gold fringe beneath the brim of his hat. He wore spectacles, and in contrast to my earlier companions, he’d hardly acknowledged me at all, except to duck his head and murmur a polite Good morning and an apology for intruding on my privacy. Though his legs were long, like a spider’s, he had folded them carefully to avoid touching mine, and when he’d opened his newspaper, he folded the sides back so they didn’t extend past the armrest between us. He’d refused the chewing gum, I remembered, though the tropical air bumped the airplane all over the sky. Other than that, he read his newspaper so quietly, turned and folded the pages with such a minimum of fuss, I confess I’d nearly forgotten he was there.
As the stewardess swept by, he bent the top of said newspaper in order to observe the fellow up front, unblinking, the way a bird-watcher might observe the course of nature from the security of his blind. I felt a stir of interest, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the quiet of him. Under cover of looking back for the stewardess, I contrived to glimpse his profile, which was younger than I thought, lightly freckled. All this, as I said, I captured in the course of a glance, but I have a good memory for faces.
After a minute or so, the gentleman folded his newspaper, murmured an apology, and rose from his seat. He set his newspaper on the seat and walked not to the front of the airplane, which he’d observed with such attention, but down the aisle to the rear, where the stewardess had gone. The airplane bumped along, the propellers droned. I looked back at the magazine on my lap—the windsor team, what did that mean, what exactly were they trying to convey, those two—and then out the window again. A series of pale golden islands passed beneath the wing, rendering the sea an even more alluring shade of turquoise, causing me almost to forget the slush in my stomach and the fuzz in my head, until the gentleman landed heavily back in the seat beside me.
Except it wasn’t the same gentleman. I knew that instantly. He was too massive, and he reeked of booze. A thigh came alongside mine, a paw settled on my knee.
“Kindly remove your hand,” I said, not kindly at all.
He leaned toward my ear and muttered something I won’t repeat.
I reached for the hand, but he was quicker and grabbed my fingers. I curled my other hand, my right hand, into a fist. I still don’t know what I meant to do with that fist, whether I really would have hit him with it. Probably I would have. The air inside our metal tube was hot, even at ten thousand feet, because of the white June sun and the warm June atmosphere and the windows that trapped it all inside, and the man’s hand was wet. I felt that bile in my throat, that heave, that grayness of vision that means you’re about to vomit, and I remember thinking I must avoid vomiting on the magazine at all costs, I couldn’t possibly upchuck my morning coffee on the pristine Windsor Team.
At that instant, the first gentleman returned. He laid a hand on the boozer’s shoulder and said, in a clear, soft English voice, “I believe you’ve made a mistake, sir.”
Without releasing my hand, the fellow turned and stretched his neck to take in the sight of the Englishman. “And I say it’s none of your business, sir.”
His voice, while slurred, wasn’t what you’d call rough. Vowels and consonants all in proper order, a conscious ironic emphasis on the word sir. He spoke like an educated man, thoroughly sauced but well brought up. You never could tell, could you?
“I’m terribly sorry. I’m afraid it is my business,” said the Englishman. “For one thing, you’re sitting on my newspaper.”
Again, he spoke softly. I don’t think the other passengers even knew what was going on, had even the slightest inkling—if they noticed at all—that these two weren’t exchanging a few friendly words about the weather or the Brooklyn Dodgers or Hitler’s moustache or something. The Englishman didn’t look my way at all. The boozer seemed to have forgotten me as well. His grip loosened. I yanked away my fingers and dug into my pocketbook for a handkerchief. The boozer reached slowly under his rump and drew out the crushed newspaper. The Miami Herald, read the masthead, sort of.
“There you are,” he said. “Now beat it.”
Those last words seemed out of place, coming from a voice like that, like he’d heard the phrase at the movies and had been waiting for the chance to sound like a real gangster. His empty hand rested on his knee and twitched, twitched. The fingers were clean, the square nails trimmed, the skin pink, except for an ugly, cracked, weeping sore on one of his knuckles.
The Englishman pushed back his glasses and leaned a fraction closer.
“I beg your pardon. I don’t believe I’ve made myself clear. I’d be very grateful if you’d return to your own seat, sir, and allow me to resume the use of mine.”
“You heard me,” said the boozer. “Scram.”
He spoke more loudly now, close to shouting, and his voice rang above the noise of the engine. People glanced our way, over their newspapers and magazines, and glanced back just as quickly. Nobody wanted trouble, not with a drunk. You couldn’t tell what a drunk might do, and here we flew, two miles above the ocean in a metal tube. I myself had begun to perspire. The sweat trickled from my armpits into the sleeves of my best blouse of pale blue crepe, my linen jacket. The boozer was getting angrier, despite the soothing, conciliatory nature of the Englishman’s voice, or maybe because of it. The force of his anger felt like a match in the act of striking, smelled like a striking match, the tang of saltpeter in your nose and the back of your throat. My fingers curled into the seams of my pocketbook.
“I’m afraid not,” said the Englishman.
The boozer looked like he was going to reply. He gathered himself, straightened his back, turned his head. His cheeks were mottled. The Englishman didn’t move, didn’t flinch. The boozer opened his mouth and caught his breath twice, a pair of small gasps. Then he closed his eyes and slumped forward, asleep. The Englishman removed his hand from the boozer’s shoulder and bent to sling the slack arm over his own shoulders.
“I’ll just escort this gentleman to his seat, shall I?” he said to me. “I’m awfully sorry for the trouble.”
No one spoke. No one moved. The stewardess stood in the aisle, braced on somebody’s headrest, hand cupped over mouth, while the Englishman hoisted the unconscious man to his feet and bore him— dragged him, really—toward the empty seat in the second row. The airplane found a downdraft and dropped, recovered, rattled about, dropped again. The Englishman lurched and caught himself on the back of the single seat to the left, third row. He apologized to the seat’s owner and staggered on. The stewardess then dashed forward and helped him lower the boozer into his seat like a sack of wet barley. Together they buckled him in, while the elderly woman to his right looked on distastefully. (I craned my neck to watch the show, believe me.)
Nobody knew what to say. Nobody knew quite what we
