Needless to say, for all his daydream eagerness, now that he was actually presented with the possibility of falling in love with a beautiful young woman sitting next to him on an airplane, Peter was terrified. Terrified that he might actually get what he’d dreamt of getting and terrified that now, having the opportunity to get it, he would screw up. If he did not find some way to speak to this young woman, and charm her, he would kill himself. If he spoke to her and she, without even looking at him, gathered her belongings and moved to another seat, he would also kill himself. The plane had taken off by this time and drifted slowly, as it seemed, above a thick wadding of cloud. The sound of the engines was loud but had become familiar and functioned as thought-extinguishing white noise. Peter was hanging in the air and for five hours essentially nothing would change. The unvariegated membrane of time that stretched before him would be dimpled only when the flight attendant handed him a beverage and a packet of pretzels. Yet, and nevertheless, notwithstanding all this inertia, tremendous forces of potential energy were gathered in this setting. For without even speaking to her, Peter was convinced, he knew for a certainty, he had not the slightest doubt, that he could spend the rest of his life with the young woman who had happened to sit next to him, and it would be blissful.
He could tell this not simply on account of her appearance, or the book she read, but because of the way she held the book in her hands, the way she tilted her head, the way she lightly set her lips together. All this provided more than enough evidence of her kindness, devotion, wisdom, grace, wit, and capacity for love. Never in his experience had he learned more about a woman’s character after thorough, and often quite unpleasant, explorations of it than he had already known within thirty seconds of meeting her. (With men, he had discovered, you needed five seconds.) And now he heard the voice of emotional maturity explain to him, patronizingly, that his assumptions about this young woman were based on a “fantasy.” Real life, real marriage, involves a commitment to a real person with all her flaws and individual needs. A real life together was doing the dishes when you were tired and paying the mortgage. He stole another glance at the young woman. He imagined her thumb and forefinger grasping a ballpoint pen and writing out a mortgage check, her hand working like some antique mechanism that was a marvel to the world. Bring on the dishes.
So, as we have seen, however inert the setting might seem to be, tremendous forces were gathered in the cabin of this aircraft. Forces. Tremendous ones. Peter knew that with the smallest effort he could potentiate the situation, with epochal consequences for his life and happiness. It was as if the entire cabin were filled with the tasteless, odorless fumes of powerful romantic-sexual gas, and only a spark was needed to create an explosion; the plane would suffer no damage, the other passengers wouldn’t even notice, but the result would change his life.
What would that spark be? Peter was not one of those people who easily strike up conversations with strangers. If there were a subset of that group from which he was even more decisively excluded, it would be that which consists of men who easily strike up conversations with strangers who are pretty girls. His best friend was able to meet the eyes of a girl in line at the movies and smile and casually say something like “So, do you think this really is as good as his last one?” Then they’d be off and running. Peter, meanwhile, expected to address the girl’s friend, would stand by, mute.
The young woman sighed, shifted in her seat, stretched a little, and looked up. Here was his moment. He could look over and ask, What takes you to Los Angeles? He could say that. What takes you to Los Angeles? The words circled around and around in his head, like the tigers who turned to butter. What takes you to Los Angeles? What takes you to Los Angeles? What takes you to Los Angeles? He became almost dizzy with their silent repetition. Then something strange happened. This was very odd. Peter was not prone to auditory hallucinations, but he thought that he actually heard the words “What takes you to Los Angeles?” being spoken aloud. Suddenly understanding, he jumped in his seat.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he heard a warm mezzo voice say. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just wondering: What takes you to Los Angeles?” The young woman had spoken to him, and Peter looked at her and her mild, friendly expression. He noticed, as he had not before, how her philtrum rhymed with the shallow cleft in her chin. It was time for him to say something. He was looking at her; she was looking at him with that mild expression of conversational invitation. His brain clicked and whirred and blinked.
Finally, he managed to say, “Work.” (More accurately transcribed as “Grk.”)
Now Peter braced himself for the inevitable: What sort of work do you do? New Wave, West Coast jazz pianist. Vintner. Assassin. No, he would have to say that he worked for a Wall Street firm and right now was in the corporate finance department—and therefore was the most boring human being you could possibly meet on a plane flying to Los Angeles. Corporate finance. My God. Well, you see, right now we’re issuing some convertible debt for a midsized bank … In fact, there were aspects of it that were interesting to him, but no regular human being, and certainly no beautiful young woman, would ever want to have a conversation about such a subject or believe that a person so employed was worth talking to about anything. He would tell her what he did, and the remaining four hours and fifty minutes of the flight would pass in silence.
But the young woman didn’t ask about his job. Instead, she asked, “Do you like Los Angeles?”
“Do you like Los Angeles?” Another impossible question! He knew that the accepted thing was to hold “L.A.” in contempt. Still, you couldn’t act too proud of yourself for bashing the place, since that was so conventional. If you made a smug wisecrack about it—“Breast implants? Those people need brain implants!”—you risked sounding like a very tiresome person eager to beat a horse that had already been turned to dust. Yet you couldn’t actually say you liked L.A., could you? What pressure. Pro, con? Funny, serious? Knowing, naïve? Good, bad? Yes, no? Zero, one? Up, down? Back, forth? He toggled between responses and finally produced a sort of ingenious synthesis: “L.A. is all right.”
He watched the aperture of the young woman’s lovely face close ever so slightly and felt a pang in his heart. Two nearly monosyllabic responses did not exactly encourage further conversation. He was losing her. So he said, “I guess I really don’t know it very well. I guess you do a lot of driving.” This was brilliant stuff! He continued: “I know there’s a whole world of young movie stars living in old movie stars’ houses and spending millions on thirties French furniture, but that’s not what I ever see. From what I see, Los Angeles is like any other city where they have lots of highways and air-conditioning. The tables in the conference rooms where I spend my time have the same executive walnut veneer. Otherwise, I’m in my rented car or at the hotel. I guess there are palm trees. I guess there is this tremendous myth of Los Angeles: you’re with your girl by her pool at her huge place, built by a silent-screen star; you are both as beautiful as a youth and maiden in a heroic painting; the beads of water on your skin are glittering in the sun. There’s that sealed-in, airless feeling you get that makes you think you’re isolated even