Up in the Air

My toes curl in my boots. I feel invaded, as if I’ve just opened the curtains in my living room and discovered a neighbor with binoculars. Thank heaven I haven’t flown Desert Air this month, though if they’re doing this, Morse’s Great West will follow. I have to admit that, lately, I’ve felt watched.

“You’d be amazed how well it worked,” says Pinter. “We ran a satisfaction survey afterwards and couldn’t have been more pleased with the responses.”

“What else are you suggesting that they do?”

“Closed-circuit televisions in the gates connected to video cameras in the cabins. To shorten those anxious minutes when people deplane. You’re waiting for someone, perhaps you’re holding flowers, but it seems to take ages before you see his face. You worry he missed his flight. You don’t know what to think. This way you see him the moment he’s in range.”

He looks to me for a reaction, and I blink. His ideas are pure foolishness, born of arrogance. The man hardly flies, yet he’s dashing off prescriptions for a growing regional carrier. This is hubris. This is too much fame. I’m of a mind to pocket my proposal and tailor it for one of Pinter’s critics—for Arthur Cargill, maybe, of the Keane Group, the father of Duplicative Skills Reporting.

“Help me,” says Pinter. “You’re skeptical. Speak up.”

“With all due respect, sir—”

“Don’t kowtow. It’s beneath you. I made a few inquiries after your call and discovered you’re very well thought of. An up-and-comer. I agreed to share a meal with you because I expected a peer-to-peer exchange.”

I don’t dare ask him who spoke so highly of me. Someone at MythTech? I’ve heard he’s close to them. There’s a story that he attended the Child’s wedding, an exclusive affair in Sun Valley, Idaho, and presented the newlyweds with a silver cheese knife given to him by a Saudi prince in appreciation for his work untangling supply lines in the Gulf War.

“I come to this as a consumer,” I say. “A passenger. I appreciate your spirit, but frankly I feel like you’re toying with people’s lives here. An aircraft is not a glass beaker.”

“The world’s a beaker. This is axiomatic in our field.”

“Churches? Are churches beakers?”

Pinter glares. I’ve violated the code of our profession by invoking the sacred. I’m out of bounds.

“You’re religious?” he says.

“Not conventionally.”

“Of course not. No one’s conventionally anything anymore. But do you believe in the image of God in man?”

“I see where you’re going with this. I slipped. I’m sorry. I’ve been surrounded by Mormons for a decade.”

“It’s leaching in. You insulted me,” he says. “You implied I’m corrupt. A Faustian. Untrue. Helping this little airline find an edge in an increasingly cutthroat industry offends not a single commandment, that I’m aware of. In truth, it’s a moral act par excellence.”

“I repeat my apology.”

Pinter sighs, gets up. The difference in his stature sitting and standing is remarkably slight. He’s all torso and no legs, though his long baggy jacket conceals the fact. We face each other. He addresses my chest, as if we’re the same height, and in my weakness I play along—I crouch.

“Margaret and I have been cooking. A request: none of your God talk at supper. And no business.”

“You do understand why I’ve come, I hope. My concept?”

“Afterwards. At the table we stay ‘on topic.’ ”

“And what’s the topic?”

“That’s up to you. The guest.”

“I’ve taken your classes. I want to thank you for them. You were on satellite. You couldn’t see me.”

“That’s an assumption you have no basis for.”

“I know how satellites work.”

“The old ones, maybe.”

Because the street-side entrance to his house is blocked by landscapers and mounds of earth and because the front porch has been removed, leaving the doorway suspended in a wall, Pinter parks his new German sports coupe in an alley. It’s been a long ride. Ontario has traffic, uniformly frantic in all directions, like a stepped-on anthill, and Pinter has no business being out in it. His driving style combines inattention to others with a deep absorption in his own car. Even while cruising, he fussed with the controls, tilting the wheel and pumping up the lumbar and adjusting the louvered vents of the AC. He’ll die in that car, and I suspect he knows it, which is why he’s so eager to enjoy its gimmicks.