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A storm cloud crossed Liss’s face as she arched her brows and pursed her lips. She sighed audibly as she did so, and I thought again how unlike anyone I had every known she was.
“My boyfriend,” she finally replied, then grabbed a mound of noodles with her chopsticks and shoved them all into her mouth. The subject was closed.
I reconsidered my observation of a moment before. In the months I’d gotten to know her, this was the first I was learning of Jake. Clearly this was someone who could keep her own counsel, who knew as much about discretion as any well-bred Laotian.
She stared at me, daring me to ask more questions.
“Would he mind if I took your picture?”
“What?”
“I mean, Liss, if you became one of my subjects for my photography?”
“All the pictures you’re always taking on campus? The ones for your photography class? What’s that to do with me?”
“I’ve been focusing on landscapes, yes. But later this semester we will practice portraits. Will you do it?”
She shrugged, non-committally.
“Why not?”
“I’m not photogenic. You’ll get better pictures with someone else.”
“I’ll have more fun with you, la.”
She smirked.
“You win, Nao Kao. Anyway, it’s not my grade. And as for Jake, no, he wouldn’t mind. But he also won’t know because he’s left Ann Arbor and we’re about to break up.”
My heart jumped.
LISS
First class is discreet, with seats too widely spaced for chitchat even if one might be so inclined. That was seldom the case even in the before times – no need of a hoodie and headphones to telegraph to your neighbor up front that small talk is not your thing. These days, after what feels like a lifetime of warnings of stranger-danger-of-the-infectious-variety, no one is inclined to make small talk with their seatmate anyway. The chatter of smug men sharing their successes is no more.
I flicked on the tv, remembering that the last time I flew, I’d binged on theDownton Abbeymovie, once, twice, three times in the mental fog of thirty-eight thousand feet as I flew back home from Shanghai. Surely, in the hundreds of choices catalogued in Delta Studio I could find something to serve as a similar narcotic.
Big Bang Theory. Curb Your Enthusiasm. Friends. Friends!Ha! Nao Kao told me I looked like Jennifer Aniston once. Our hair alone made for a laughable comparison – she, the woman who popularized The Rachel, and me with my tangle of red. Nicole Kidman I might have understood. Instead, I had accused him of thinking all white girls of a certain age looked alike.
“Only the pretty ones,” he replied, and perhaps I should have known then that the game was up: the emperor was not the only one who was far away.
I reminded him of that recently, a single line of text pinging around the planet and received only a telltale laughing sticker in return.
“Dammit, Nao Kao,” I’d replied, “don’t mock me with those stickers.”
I checked the time. Still another ten hours to Seoul.
I used to read voraciously on these transpacific runs, as much as three books on some flights, but I could not have concentrated on anything more serious than Dr. Seuss on this flight. Not that Seuss would have been a bad choice. You can learn a lot from the good doctor, I mused as Phoebe sang about her smelly cat.
My personal favorite Seuss book isOh, the Places You’ll Go!,which I have gifted to more than one recent graduate over the years with the observation that it is no more and no less than the handbook for life. Who better than Seuss to remind the young and ambitious – or even, maybe especially, the not-so-young and ambitious – that you’ll no sooner be amongst the high fliers and soaring heights than you will fall back to earth.
Bang-ups, Dr. Seuss will have you know, and hang-ups, can happen to you. Thecanmight be my only quibble: will. most. definitely. Yes: bang-ups and hang-ups will absolutely, positively happen to you. That is more like it.
In that case, you may be headed, he fears, toward a most useless place. Connoisseurs of Seuss will know that I am not making this up. The most useless place is The Waiting Place. It is here, in this waiting place, where the masses are, as the name implies, just waiting: for trains and planes to come or go, for the rains to pass or a decision at last, or maybe just for a second chance. Everyone is just waiting.
It sounded a lot like the pandemic life, and even more like this flight. Waiting to see what – or, more to the point, who – was waiting for me.
I turned my attention back toFriends; if I squinted hard enough, I could almost see myself in Jennifer Aniston.
