Up in the Air

My genes only partly account for all the women, though. Sheer availability matters too. I’m out there among them, mixing, every day, eating a spinach salad one table over, changing my return date in the same ticket line. Take Wendy. I met her at the registration desk of the Fort Worth Homestead Suites. The hotel computer had eaten her reservation, an American Legion convention was in town, and she was facing a night without a room when I stepped up with my Premier-Ultra Guest Card. The clerk reversed herself; Wendy got her key. It was only fair that she join me for fillet at the in-house Conestoga Grill, where my mastery of the modest wine list wowed her. Soon, we were talking shop. Her shop: cosmetics. The animal-testing furor. The Asian market. “Organic” versus “natural.” I knew the business. That she lived two doors down from my sister never came up—not until afterwards, while watching pay-per-view, wrapped in a humid polyester sheet, our clothes and papers strewn across the room like wreckage from a trailer-park tornado. Our parting posture, unconsciously devised while watching Tom Cruise destroy a bio-terror ring, was that of two jaded orgiasts (focus word) putting one over on the Bible Belters.

A few days later Kara called my mobile and said that friend of hers had seen my picture in a family photo album and asked if I ever came to Utah. Subtle. Playing along, I flew to Utah twice that month, saw Wendy both times, then decided to back off when she thrust at me a sheaf of poems about her struggles with her Mormon faith.

She hadn’t said she was a member. It broke the deal. These people believe that in the life to come they’ll rule their own stars and planets as God rules ours. Lori, after she left me, became one, too, switching from short skirts to full-length dresses and marrying a real estate executive who had her pregnant within a couple of months.

My fling with Wendy wasn’t typical. Usually, there’s more romance, a slower buildup. I spot someone, or she spots me, across a buffet table or a conference room. Later, we find ourselves on the same flight and exchange a few words while dawdling in the aisle, mentioning to each other where we’ll be staying. At seven, as both of us step from scalding showers, snug inside freshly laundered terry robes, our hair still fragrant with giveaway shampoo, the telephone rings in one of our hotel rooms. A dinner follows where we compare our schedules and learn that we’ll both be in San Jose on Thursday—or that we can be, if we want to be. The next night, from different hotels, we speak again. For me, no sensation is more intoxicating than lying alone in bed, strange room, strange city, talking to someone I barely know who’s also disoriented and on her own. Her voice becomes my chief reality; lacking other landmarks, I cling to it. And she clings to my voice. Each other is all we have. By Thursday, as we park our rented Sables in front of a restaurant that neither of us has eaten at but that both of us have read good things about in Great West’s in-flight magazine, Horizons, a sense of destiny beckons. Until dessert.

Chance is an erratic matchmaker. Now and then it seats me next to women I wouldn’t dream of approaching on my own. On other occasions it dishes up a Wendy, superficially suitable but with a flaw. And a few times, I fear, it has offered me perfection.

“When will you be in Seattle?” Kara asks.

“I get in Wednesday.”

“Late?”

“Mid-afternoon. But I might have to go to Arizona instead.”

“Here are your instructions. Listening? Go straight to the Pike Street Market—it shuts at six—and order twelve pounds of king salmon, alder-smoked. Send it overnight to Mom’s, but make sure you inspect it first. Look for red, firm meat.”

“I can’t do this over the phone?”

“You have to see it. Make sure it’s good fish.”

“By the weekend it won’t be fresh, though.”

“It’s smoked. It’ll keep. Don’t flake out on me this time. Don’t pull another Santa Fe.”

She wounds me. Santa Fe was a fluke, and not my fault. Our mother had visited a gallery there during one of her winter Winnebago runs with her current husband, the Lovely Man. (So called because he’s small, he hardly speaks, and he has no discernible personality.) She fell in love with a Zuni bracelet there and described it to Julie, who mentioned it to Kara, who ordered me, on my next trip to New Mexico, to buy the thing as a gift from the whole family on my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday. I did my best, but due to a buildup of errors in the description, the piece my mother ultimately received was Hopi, ill-fitting, overpriced, and, as my mother told the Lovely Man (who then told Kara, proving he’s not so lovely), “positively god-awful.”

“Unfair,” I say.

“Well, this is your chance to redeem yourself.”

“Unfair.”