Up in the Air

Margaret stands on a step by the back door holding an old-style cocktail with a cherry in it. She looks like a girl in her twenties who’s been aged by an amateur movie makeup artist using spirit gum for wrinkles and sprinkled baby powder to gray her hair. She greets me too kindly, kissing both my cheeks, yet barely acknowledges her co-domestic, who knifes past her into the kitchen and pours two drinks. The kitchen is one of the two inhabitable rooms, the other being a bedroom whose door is open, through which I can see a massive four-poster bed dressed with paisley sheets and furry blankets like the type you once saw on water beds. Access to the remainder of the house is blocked by thumbtacked sheets of dusty plastic. Behind them, a shadowy carpenter fires off bursts from a pneumatic nail gun. The noise is piercing.

“Sandy tells me you live in Colorado, out on the frontier.”

“I used to live there. I had an apartment, that is. I gave it up.”

“Where do you live now?”

“Just here and there.”

“Literally?”

“People do it. And not a few.”

“So this is a trend?”

“Not yet. You’ll see it soon, though.”

A drink is placed in my hand. It’s sweet and strong and tastes of 1940s Hollywood. Pinter lights another cigarette and resumes his peculiar smoking trance while peppery Margaret continues with the questions, timing her words to avoid the nail gun’s volleys. Over the royal bed I glimpse a picture: some mythical scene of a semi-naked virgin being chased through a dappled glade by randy goat-men.

The table is set, but I detect no cooking odors. Pinter wraps an apron around his waist and opens a curvy vintage refrigerator packed solid with convenience food. His cigarette smoke mingles with the frost cloud, a sight I find profoundly unappetizing.

“We’re dining alfresco this afternoon,” says Margaret. “The construction draws so much current our stove is useless. Did Sandy describe our project to you?”

“No. It looks like it’s fairly extensive.”

She motions me forward, then peels back the curtain of plastic. I peek through. The living room walls have been stripped back to the studs and a circular hole the size of a small swimming pool has been cut in the hardwood floor.

“Our arena,” says Margaret. “Sandy thought it up. See where the ceiling’s gone? That’s where the lights go. We’ll surround it with comfortable seating, pillows, throws. A stage for our debates, out little theatricals. We proportioned it after the Colosseum, actually.”

“Your guacamole’s skinned over,” Pinter says.

“Squeeze lemon juice on it.”

“I can’t find the chips.”

“You ate them in the night. Just use saltines.”

Margaret refastens the plastic in the doorway. I have questions, but don’t know where to start; the syrupy cocktail has turned my brain to sludge. The puzzle of the arena aside, what happened to Pinter’s dietary discipline? The spread he’s begun to assemble on the table—plastic tubs of pre-made onion dip, lunchmeat slices rolled and pinned with toothpicks, a dish of canned fried onions, a jar of olives—reminds me of sample day at a small-town supermarket or the grand opening of a Chevy dealer. I wonder if its wealth of additives holds the secret to Margaret’s pickled youthfulness.

Pinter refreshes our drinks and we sit down. The china and silver are real, the napkins linen. Pinter, since coming home, has gained in stature, and as we toast—“To the life force,” Margaret says—I see that both the table and the counters stand at wheelchair height. I tower beside them. I feel fatherly, monumental. Normal-sized Margaret’s the mother and Pinter’s our son.

“So,” she says, “did you select a topic?” She’s poised to start eating, but there are rules, apparently.

“An actual formal topic.”

They nod.

“I’m blank. Politics?”

“Anything,” Pinter snorts. He’s hungry. “Our last guest—”

“Don’t lead him,” says Margaret. “Let him associate.”

My gaze drifts to the bedroom painting. “Pursuit.”

They smile and dip their crackers. I’m a hit. I take a rolled slice of bologna as my prize.

“I think it’s important to start experientially. Now which of us at this table,” Pinter asks, “has actually been pursued?”

“I have,” Margaret says.

“Ryan?”

“Romantically? Professionally?”

“You chose the topic. What was on your mind?”

“Omaha.”

“Them,” he says. “No business talk.”

“You know them, though?”

“We’ve mingled. No business talk.”

Margaret dabs guacamole off her lips. “Sandy, you’ve heard this, so try not to jump in. It happened in London, England, in the sixties. Sandy was there as a guest of British Railways.”

“Rationalizing their timetables,” he says.

“I’d read about Carnaby Street in all the magazines and wanted to buy an outfit. I took a bus. I rode on the top deck, to see the sights. There were a couple of boys with Beatles haircuts—Sandy had one himself once—”

“Oh go to hell.”

“You did.”

I reach for a black olive. My drink is empty. Why is Pinter staring at my crotch?

“Anyway, two moptops. Drinking beer. Out of those extra large cans the English favor. And I, in what I’d guess you’d call my innocence—”