“We do corporate work, so no.” I tried to emphasize my disinterest by rummaging in my bag for a bag of seedless grapes.
“We always need a P.R. guy for our cases. I represent a guy accused of fraud. You think you can get him an interview in the Journal or the Times? We’ve tried and it’s been a battle. We just need a piece, something to sway the jury. His trial is in three months. The jury is mostly multiracial—no offense.”
I covered my hands on my lap, as if it mattered.
He watched me doing this and said, “I may try to get involved myself, maybe go on TV and speak in his defense. What do you think? And I am sure I have seen you somewhere.”
“I’m afraid we’re oversubscribed at the moment.” I stuffed some grapes in my mouth and tried to reclaim some savor of solitude by turning towards the window and feigning interest in the view—green earth in between the gauzy clouds, car specks marching off to nowhere. He went on speaking about his plaintiff while I initiated my breathing exercises and imagined Catskill light over the whoosh of the jet stream.
Then there was a shrill loudspeaker interruption, a pitch to apply for the airline Visa card—bonus miles for debt—and my seatmate took one of the applications that were being distributed without looking up, placed it over his invoices, and started checking the tidy boxes with trance intensity. I pretended to look across at the other window and glanced at his sheet. Divorced. New dependents. New address. The “Other” income box, the one that says, “over $750,000.” I finished my breathing exercises and thought about the unanswered emails, texts, voicemails. Gold prices. The indeterminate distance past the clouds.
“Then I must have seen you on television,” he said to me, checking the hours on his timesheet with a cell calculator.
There was a woman across the aisle in the window seat. She was smiling at me. The resemblance to Monica was uncanny.
“These drinks. It’s like flying in a convenience store now. I’m serious. Try flying to Paris or Seoul or Buenos Aires—same food, different direction. They don’t give you much of anything anywhere anymore. You’re expected to be self-sufficient. You’re probably not old enough to remember what it was like to fly to London on the Concorde. They’d set up a caviar buffet right in aisle—right there. Petrossian. It was vodka and caviar and Marlboros and zip—New York to Europe in three hours tops.”
He looked me up and down and said, “Maybe you’ve made those trips too. Well, if you haven’t, they are truly exceptional and I am talking about the whole gamut—the glitzy hotels, the clients, the chauffeured cars—all that aristocracy. We need it over here, I’ll tell you that. I don’t know your politics, but mine are whatever is paying the hourly fees, you know? The aristocracy. You know they have people over there whose father’s father went to Cambridge or Oxford or wherever—and they basically carry the causes of their ancestors, this is their vocation, it’s this mission or value system passed down through the lineage. They’re not as free thinking as we are, but at least it’s more civil; they are honoring tradition. I need another one.” He signaled for a refill.
The stewardess, Brenda, per her nametag, came back and snapped open a can of Motts and poured out the Smirnoff nip without blinking and stabbed at a lemon cube and poked it into the drink. She wore too much rouge and had parchment hands.
“Twenty years ago, they’d leave the goddamn bottle and the captain would come out and have one with us. Who knows if they flew intoxicated back then, just like in that movie. So, what do you think?”
“I think there are rules against that.”
“You’re funny. No, I meant the case, my case, the jury.”
“Do you know what I think of the Times and the Journal?”
“I’m desperate to know,” he said, chugging the drink.
“Your case is fairly hopeless and there’s nothing the media will want to write about it because your story likely has too many nuances. There’s too many stories and too few journalists. That’s my assessment, Lorem Ipsum Dolorem.”
“Coffee too, dear. Thank you,” he said, not as shocked as I had hoped.
Brenda poured the coffee a little too theatrically, as if the pot were a carafe of Margaux. Would I like the chicken or the beef or we have ravioli, she asked us. I waved her off and ordered vodka-cranberry.
“Well,” he said, “I guess we should have hired you a few years ago before we loaded up on bad firms. It’s nice to get a fucking straight answer now and then.”
The woman across the aisle smiled again. She was maybe forty, most certainly private sector. She wore a peak lapel white suit. Although, Monica would have worn it differently; she would have lent it some insouciance, projected some mild defiance with that way she fluffed her hair from her shoulders with the back of her hands, jettisoning that raven sheen behind her. She would have perforated the monotony by pulling on the pink gloves with the fox fur cuffs that she used to break out this time of year.
This was the month she always left for Mexico. I am like a monarch butterfly, she would say. I fly south after the first frost. Then she would migrate for a month to that red clay town with a bell tower up in the hills, had a hunched studio right off the Calle San Miguel, near the poorly lit bodega with no labels on their tequila bottles and the bartender with the Fu Manchu. She said the town had the right light for her work, air that nursed her imagination.
We are never where we are.
It was something she said whenever she saw me on the phone making dinner or reading an email if we were already in a conversation, when my attention was subdivided among apps and browsers and inboxes and people. This was my fifth business trip in two months. If I was not on the phone I was in a meeting and if I was not in a meeting or on the phone I was on a business trip. Whatever was left I called home.
*
Last week, I’d flown to Copenhagen to meet a new client, my journey marked by the clang of saucers at the Segafredo coffee kiosk in the arrivals terminal at Tegel. A man with an Ayatollah beard was stretched out asleep on a bank of leather chairs, an empty orange Fanta bottle on the table beside his head, everywhere the punishing density of German, the sky lunar gray with morning and later the October sea already frozen as I rode out to the old Grand Bretagne, now the country’s finest hotel, where I even saw the Danish Queen sleigh-riding by, votives flickering on all the breakfast tables when I arrived and an oversized staircase spiraling up through the center of the refurbished building. They had kept the original façade, but now it was called d’Angleterre.
I waited for Lars, my client, in the hotel bar, long enough for a croissant and two macchiatos. I’d been hired by the private equity firm that backed him and his lover, Fung. Lars was a Dutch hacker, something to do with bitcoin and the Mt. Gox scandal, and now he and Fung were co-founders of a startup that translated spoken Mandarin into English and vice versa. The IPO was the week after Thanksgiving.