Wanting vs. Having

I always arrive early. It’s a holdover habit from half a lifetime flying stand-by. If a flight left at four, I’d be there by noon: the difference between being first or third on the stand-by list could mean the difference between waking up in Europe or the O’Hare Airport Days Inn.

I was an airline baby: my stepmother worked for American so; up until the age of 26, I paid almost nothing for my flights. After that it cost more and I slipped a class in the “non-revenue” food chain which went, in descending order: flight crews being shuttled between assignments (dead heading), full-time employees, their spouses, their children under 26, rubbish bin liners and me.

I finally gave up the non-rev hustle after one particularly gruelling but not at all unusual adventure in New York. I was travelling with my girlfriend who had sensibly purchased full fare tickets; I was last on a stand-by list that looked like the Los Angeles phone directory. No problem, if I don’t get on the flight with my girlfriend, I’ve got four backups; I waved reassuringly to her as she walked down the boarding ramp. No worries.

Then it started to snow.

Then every single de-icing machine at JFK, save one, decided to call in sick.

I knew I was in trouble.

Like any veteran stand-by passenger, I pray for early departures and late taxis. Every second that a plane sits with its doors open gives some poor guy with a real ticket a better chance of bumping me out of my seat and into that Days Inn.

I watched with mounting dejection as flight after flight displayed DELAYED in their departure column. The lounges filled up with passengers shuffling from gate to gate hoping to find anything that could break through the wall of white that had descended on the runways.

The weather cleared and passengers began to board; my name wasn’t called. Three flights went out, standing room only- I had one last shot at getting to Heathrow the same day as my girlfriend; it was going to be very, very close.

I called my step mum on my mobile, she was watching the list; I was eighth and they only had seven seats. Other stand-by passengers crowded around me shouting, “Where am I? Where am I?” Her voice lit up like an announcer calling a grand slam, “Kiddo, one couple didn’t want to get split up; they declined their seats, you’re on!” On cue, they called my name, handed me the last boarding pass for the last seat on the last flight to London. I walked on feeling like a prize fighter who just went 15 rounds and, somewhat inexplicably, sees his opponent trip on his shoelaces, fall and knock himself unconscious just at the bell.

I was so stupid with exhaustion after that flight (I can’t sleep on planes) that I left my iPod in the seatback. Upon reaching home, my girlfriend made sure I felt even worse by telling me how worried she was that she didn’t know if I got on any of the flights. I was instructed never to fly stand-by again; from that moment on I paid for normal tickets and became a mileage whore.

But that's not what I wanted to write about.

Picture if you will, a small, hip, veggie café in California, the exact location must remain a closely guarded secret so as to protect the identity of one of the participants in the upcoming saga. It’s just after sunset; the air is warm and people with tans are mulling around trying to look rich. It was a good thing that I got there early because the place was heaving. Packed full of, well, people just like me: reasonably affluent educated liberals with meat aversions. I put my name on the list and wandered back outside to wait.

I’m a pretty patient guy. I don’t mind queues at grocery stores or movie theatres and, if I set my mind to it, I can do some pretty serious daydreaming. The one thing I am absolutely no good at is nervous anticipation.

I had my trusty Yashica T4 with me so I snapped a few photos even though I knew the light was bad. I watched a guy use his dog as bait to catch attractive strangers and finally I sat down at an iron table and pretended to read e-mails I had already read on my Blackberry. How did we ever look busy in public before Blackberries?

She saw me first and stood slightly outside my peripheral vision. It took me a moment to realize she was there and a moment longer to compose myself enough to say anything at all. I believe my first words were, “Ohmyfuckinggodit’syou!”

She sat down across from me. We looked at each other for a moment and I was relived to see that her smile was as large and goofy looking as mine.

“Well…” I said.
“Yep…” she said.

She stood up. “Come here!” she demanded, spreading her arms wide.

I threw myself at her with such force that she had to take a step back to keep from crashing down onto the sidewalk. I held her so hard I thought I could feel her ribs buckling. I picked her up, she was light as a butterfly wing; her legs curled up behind her. We were laughing with a pure, hysterical, manic laughter that almost but not quite descended to tears. All the while we were both saying, over and over again, “I can’t believe it’s you!”

We were still giggling after we had untangled ourselves and sat down. We each took a deep breath and then, apropos of nothing, she said, “You always show up at just the right time, I’m getting a divorce.”

I don’t know what I was expecting her to say but it sure wasn’t that. If it had been anyone else I might have thought she was simply yanking my chain, testing to see what kind of reaction this news would evoke. But not her, she was serious as a heart attack. What I said next was vastly different than what I was thinking.

I said, “Oh no! That’s awful! What happened? I thought you guys were great for each other?”

I was thinking: “Holly fucking shit, that is the best news anyone could have told me in this or any other lifetime, let’s find a hotel so we can fuck like weasels!”

Let me tell you a little bit about the person sitting there at the table with me. We’ll call her Emily because I like the name and it in some ways seems to suit her.

“Emily” and I have known each other for the better part of fifteen years. I was working at a mail-order camera store when she was hired to be our receptionist. When I walked in and saw her standing there (isn’t that a Beatles song?) I suddenly understood all those tired clichés about love at first sight.

She was, at the time, newly married and newly pregnant, oddly enough, in that order. I was married too: three years into what would turn out to be a six-year saga of fucking, fighting and insanity.

It took us about ten seconds after we first made eye contact to realize that both our marriages and indeed every other relationship up to that point had been, for each of us, a grand waste of time and that, standing before us now was the person we were to destined to be with.

Of course it didn’t work out that way. We both, temporarily, stayed married, she had a daughter and then another. After my divorce I bounced from one woman to another until I finally landed in England and, well, you know the rest.

Emily and I drifted apart and lost touch. It wasn’t until I was planning one of my excursions to California that I decided to track her down. It took a fair bit of detective work but I finally found a cousin on her husband’s side who forwarded her a message from me. Three months and about a thousand e-mails later I was having dinner with her in what, it turned out, was her favourite restaurant as well as mine.

I hadn’t seen Emily in ten years but we talked as if there had been no pause in the conversation. We completed each other’s sentences, we spontaneously burst into song, we laughed way too loud and when we paused to catch our breath, we stared at each other in slack jawed amazement.

I held her hand. Her fingers were thin and delicate and she kept her nails clipped short. She still wore her wedding ring and it gave me a slight twinge when I felt it. I closed my fingers around hers and allowed my thoughts to drift a bit:

She was sitting on a porch somewhere overlooking the sea; holding a cup of coffee and smiling into the sun. Cats, dogs and kids running inside and out; I’m cooking breakfast because that is the one meal I can do without causing too much damage to our health or the global environment.

I can see her there, in profile, the outline of her face silhouetted against blue sky, red hair soft as spun silk turning to fleece in the light of a new day.

“Uh, hello?” she said, jolting me back to the moment.

“Sorry, I was just fast forwarding.”

I kissed her hand.

“Very British.” She said.

“No, very French.”

She recited the French Taunter skit from Holly Grail word for word.

This caused me to double over in laughter and when I straightened up she was looking at me in a way that made me think that she was about to make a weighty proclamation, which, as it turns out she was.

“You know,” she began “I really love you.”

Every once and a while you get to have a Han Solo moment and this was mine.

“I know,” I said.

We left the restaurant and headed up the street to Boarders Books. After taking a step or two she slid her arm around my waist and I put mine around her shoulder. That just didn’t seem right for some reason so after a moment, my left arm was around her hips and I was blind drunk with joy.

We walked that way for two blocks, chatting about things I can’t remember. I think I said something about the stars.

As we were crossing the street, arms now wrapped around each other (holding hands didn’t provide the full body contact we required) a mini van pulled up and asked for directions to the freeway. After we told them the best route the guy in the passenger seat gave us a knowing smile and said, “Enjoy the rest of your walk.” I assured him we would.

We stayed in Boarders until they kicked us out and left with two armloads of books. We’d spent the evening discovering, not to our surprise, that our taste in everything from evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics to pulp sci-fi and art magazines was, without a single exception, identical.

It was a slow and silent walk to her car.

We stood next to her battered black Saab, bathed in the amber glow of a streetlight and held each other for a long time. We knew it ended there. She would open her car door and return to her kids, dog and the horror of a soon to be ex-husband who had yet to move out. In one week’s time I would board a plane for England, a girlfriend and a job that paid me too much to leave.

“Our timing, as always, sucks.” She said,

“Maybe in another lifetime I’ll get to be Arthur to your Fenchurch?”

“I’d like that.” She said and kissed me very softly.

Another long hug.

She threw her bag of books into the back seat; much to my disappointment, her car started. Many things failed to happen at that point: I failed to stop her from driving off, I failed to decide that, sod it all, I was going to be with this woman no matter what and both of us failed utterly and completely to follow through on anything that happened that night.

I went back to England.

She got a divorce.

She found another man.

And the e-mails stopped.