Blair:I’ll meet you in baggage claim.
Blair scanned the arrivals screens, looking for Jack’s incoming flight.
Coming to the airport, she’d reasoned, was almost like going to the office, where she never experienced the cyclone. Today was just another workday. She had business to conduct—fetch the visiting writer—and then she would go home.
Jack:I don’t have a checked bag. Also, we’re still on the plane.
Blair:You’re here for at least a couple months and you didn’t check a bag?
Of course he hadn’t checked a bag. Jack was a cool, snobbish artiste who was always jawing about authenticity. He probably lived in a cabin in the woods with one bowl and one spoon, both hewn out of wood from a tree he’d felled himself, and a fireplace over which he cooked deer meat he hunted himself. Blair had never been to Minnesota, butshe knew a fair bit about it secondhand, it being the setting forGreen Light. There were lakes there. Ten thousand of them, if you believed the license plates. Jack’s cabin was probably on one of them. He probably canoed across his lake to get his mail at a post office where a nosy postmistress with a heart of gold amassed his fan letters.
She snickered at the image she’d conjured, and it occurred to her that as well as she knew Jack—she knew about his writer’s block and his back issues, and she liked to think that when someone told you about his pain, of both the physical and spiritual varieties, youknewhim—she had no idea what his day-to-day life looked like.
It was a little unsettling. They’d been disembodied consciousnesses “talking” through typed words on little screens. She had referenced finding out what his favorite foods were. Why hadn’t sheaskedhim what they were? Or any of the other customary getting-to-know-you questions? Did he have siblings? What was it like being the kid of a famous dad? What did he like to do when he wasn’t agonizing over his book?
Didhe do anything besides agonize over his book?
Oh my stars, she had invited a stranger to stay in her house on a whim.
All right. Calm down.
She told herself that Jack wasn’t staying in her house; he was staying adjacent to it.
Also, Jackwasn’ta stranger. She didn’t know what he ate for breakfast, but shedidknow about his pain. They’d just skipped a few steps.
And her invitation hadn’t been issued on a whim, not really. Yes, she’d thought of it impulsively that night, as they were texting and he was talking about being stuck. But then she’d thought about how they were both stuck. About how their strange friendship, if you could even call it that, was one of the only things these days that brought her joy.
Blair:Well, I’m already here, so I’ll meet you in baggage claim.
Jack:I could have Ubered.
Yes. Or she could have sent a driver. That was what she generally did. The only person she picked up personally was Cal. She was always so excited to see him that she didn’t want to wait a minute longer than she had to. She assumed she would do and feel the same with Esme. So how to explain why she had personally driven more than an hour to fetch Jack at LAX?
Blair:I’m trying to show some Southern hospitality here.
Jack:Well, thanks. I’ll head for baggage when they let us out of plane jail.
And then, a minute later:
Jack:It appears our door is broken. That’s too heavy-handed to be a metaphor, right?
Blair:Right.
Jack:I came all this way to get my book done, and now I can’t physically get off the plane. But that’s definitely not a metaphor.
Blair:Definitely not.
Jack:Are you sure?
Blair:I don’t know, you’re the one with the MFA.
Jack:My short fiction prof would have had me forcibly removed from class if I’d written about a writer trapped on a plane.
Blair:So there you go. Way too obvious to be a metaphor.
Jack:I’d have been ejected not only because of the obviousness of the metaphor but because you’re not supposed to write about writers.
Blair:That’s stupid.
