Joy of Flying

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There is the thrashing around of sex and there is the young boy on the plane to England.

First the boy: I don’t know the child—a friend told me the story. An American family relocates to London. Ex-hausted by the excitement of his first plane ride, the young son falls asleep over the Atlantic. At Heathrow, his parents carry him from the plane to baggage claim to their taxi. He wakes, finally, groggy and quiet.

He lives in England. He is like any child, so he looks at animals and attends school and gets haircuts now and then. One day, sipping milk at the breakfast table, he looks up at his parents: When, he wants to know, will they get off the plane?

There is that and there is the light shifting almost obscenely after sex. Because of dusk it’s gone blue. The universe’s great sad moments come in this blue and, as though stoned, I decide I’ve never seen the world quite as it is now. The fly butting the windowpane from the inside, the cat with the dirty ears just beyond, the space that opens between two bodies recently inseparable, a space unveiled like a—

Let’s go, pal, she says.

I’m up, mopping off. We have a movie to catch.

My clothes trail from the bed like adult bread crumbs. Sex when it’s done begins again in replay; dressing, I recall the precipitous examination of the spider bite together on the couch, knees touching.

Having sex is preferable to remembering it, but then the act of sex doesn’t come with a pause button. I am slow-witted—my puns are generally sharpest just after my fellow conversationalist has bowled his last frame, located his hat, put on his coat, made the good-bye rounds, dug for his subway fare, and disappeared into the world. That’s when I’m real clever. Similarly, the intricacies of sex present themselves in their vividness only after I’ve achieved sufficient distance from the event. In the thick of things, I catch only flashes.

The movie turns out to be fine, like most movies. I don’t care when it shows me boring car chases, and it doesn’t seem to care when I drift away. I drift when the two actors up there start getting busy. It’s the kind of busy-getting scene where lamps fall from tables. Hello? Lamps? People guard those things like babies, and besides, that’s not sex. Somewhere along the line, movies began compensating for their prudishness with the destruction of home furnishings. I want a movie I recognize.

The movie ends and we meet friends. We talk about jobs, the dog outside the bar with three legs, magazine articles we read half of. A couple of hours after one person is inside another, the two can drink and make fart jokes with friends. We are both dumbfounded then unamazed by intercourse.

On the train home, my lady friend and I review the evening and then salvage a newspaper from the next seat. She reads about a hurricane off Florida, I look at an ad for a book about love. The book looks tasteful and generous. It wants to share 1,000 lovemaking secrets.

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