Up in the Air (4 page)

For me, the question is whether we’ll have any.

At a pay phone in one of the private business nooks between the rest rooms and the luggage lockers I rank the calls I need to make this morning. Using downtime efficiently is key—making the most of the minutes inside the minutes. I dial my credit card number (five miles right there; such silent accounting shadows my every thought), then enter a Seattle area code and the number for Advanta Publishing. I’m calling a man I’ve met just once before but who I believe can make a difference for me. We both believe in the future of
The Garage,
my “motivational fable” of an inventor who toils in his workshop, alone and undistracted, while out in the world his breakthrough innovations spawn a commercial empire he never sees. The theme is concentration, inner purity. The book isn’t long—a hundred pages or so—but that’s the trend now, wisdom in your pocket. There are men in my field who’ve made millions off such volumes, and if I can do half that well I’ll be
fixed by forty and can spend the next decade working off my miles with weekend jaunts to Manhattan, if I’m still single, or with round-trips to Disney World if I have a family.

“Morris Dwight, please,” I say to the receptionist. Dwight is my age but with an air of elegance, as though he grew up abroad, in grand hotels. He combs something into his hair that smells like wool and drops me notes in brown ink on heavy cream stock, tagging his signature with wispy doodles of seabirds and leaping fish, that kind of thing. I suspect he’s an alcoholic and a fraud and professionally unharmed by being either. His latest business title,
You Lost, Get Over It!,
has been on the
Wall Street Journal
list since spring, but it’s one of his clunkers that drew me to Advanta: Soren Morse’s own
Horizoneering: The Story of a Mid-Air Turnaround
. Outselling Morse, which shouldn’t be hard to do, would bring me a primitive, lasting satisfaction.

“Mr. Dwight’s in a meeting, sir. I’ll take your number.”

“Could I please have his voice mail?”

She disconnects me. I call again and get a busy signal that saws away at my morning optimism. I try one last time and he answers. “My friend,” he says.

I tell him I’d like to switch the drink we’ve scheduled to a more leisurely dinner, but Dwight is not the same chattering good sport I remember from the Portland club. He sounds stressed; I can hear him typing as we speak and rearranging papers on his desk. Wednesday is impossible, he tells me, due to “a sudden charitable commitment.” He suggests an early breakfast Thursday morning.

I do some speedy mental figuring with the help of my HandStar digital assistant, a wireless device I use for e-mail and to track my miles. My schedule this week leaves little room to improvise; it’s a three-dimensional chess game, meticulous. This afternoon and this evening I’ll be in Reno for a coaching session with an old client whose company is hobbling toward bankruptcy. Tomorrow, I go to Southern California to meet Sandor Pinter, consulting’s grand old man, to whom I’ll pitch an exciting freelance project that could make my name among my peers and backstop my income if MythTech and
The Garage
don’t come through. Wednesday
A.M.
I’m supposed to go to Dallas to plot a severance strategy at a consolidating HMO, but the flight’s not Great West, which makes it useless to me, so I’ve already left a message canceling and booked an earlier Seattle flight, which I now see won’t do me any good. On Thursday I head to Las Vegas for GoalQuest XX, an annual gathering
of friends and colleagues at which I intend to speak on CTC and finally unburden my bad conscience by telling all about our nasty specialty. On Friday morning I’m off to Omaha, and later that day—in a mood of triumph, I hope, after a candid sit-down with the Child—I’ll board a plane to Minneapolis and ring up my million over Iowa. When my mother and sisters meet me at the gate, I intend to be drunk, and to stay drunk through the wedding. Drunk and free, with an open-ended ticket good for a round-trip to Saturn, if I so choose, and enough credit left in my account to send a few ailing children and their parents off to Johns Hopkins or the Mayo Clinic.

How dare Dwight alter such a battle plan. If I push back my arrival at GoalQuest XX, I can make breakfast, barely, if it’s brief, but I’ll miss Great West’s only morning flight to Vegas and have to slum it on Desert Air or Sun South, losing a thousand-mile connection bonus that I won’t be able to make up no matter which route I take to Omaha. The answer is to have breakfast very early and do it in the airport.

“You still there?”

I make my pitch to Dwight: 7
A.M.
at SeaTac in the food court.

“The airport?”

“I’m squeezed. I’m sorry. I’m in a bind.”

“Can I phone you back about this? This evening, say? There’s a chance I’ll be in Arizona Wednesday and maybe into Thursday. Or beyond.”

“You just told me Wednesday’s your charitable thing.”

“My life is fluid. Can we meet at eight?”

“No later than seven. It has to be at SeaTac.”

The line goes quiet. Then: “It’s almost finished?”

“I two-day aired you three fourths of it last night. I’m down to filling in and rounding off.”

“Seven, then. Call on Tuesday to confirm, though.”

“I could shoot down to Arizona, too. My Wednesday is flexible. Phoenix, is it?”

“Phoenix—but maybe Utah that evening. Or somewhere else.”

“What’s going on with you?”

“Needy authors everywhere. Blocks. Nervous breakdowns. Major tax delinquencies. Much hand-holding to do. There’s also golf. I’m in La Jolla right now at a pro-am—my woman forwarded you.”

“I hear a keyboard.”

“It’s a course-simulation program on my laptop. I’m at a table outside the pro shop, strategizing.”

“I’ll confirm,” I say.

I expect the next call to be easier. Lower stakes. Kara, my oldest sister, who functions as our family’s social secretary, lives south of Salt Lake City in a suburb that might have been squeezed from a tube, with recreation centers for the kids and curving boulevards split by bike-path medians. She drives a Saab that’s cleaner than when she leased it and works full-time hours as a volunteer for literacy programs and battered-women shelters. Her husband makes it all possible, a software writer flush with some of the fastest money ever generated by our economy. He hangs pleasantly in the background of Kara’s life, demanding nothing, offering everything. They’re bountiful, gracious people, here to help, who seem to have sealed some deal with the Creator to spread his balm in return for perfect sanity. I pray that no real tragedy ever befalls them. It would be wrong, a sinful, cosmic breach.

Our business this morning relates to Saturday’s wedding, when Julie, my kid sister, will try again to camouflage her multiple addictions and general pathological dependency long enough to formalize a bond with a man who has no idea what he’s up against. Kara has worked for years to forge this match. She chose the groom, a fellow she dated in high school who sells New Holland tractors in our hometown by capitalizing on his youthful fame as a fearsome all-state running back. Kara’s goal is time travel, it seems: a marriage that will approximate our parents’ and secure our family’s future in its old county. Even the house Julie thinks that she picked out (in truth it was Kara who narrowed the field for her by passing secret instructions to the Realtor) could double for the home place. Same porch, same dormers, same maze of sagging handyman additions.

“Where are you?” Kara asks me when I call. It’s always her first question, and her silliest.

“Hung up at DIA. The Denver airport.”

“Someone saw you in Salt Lake on Friday. You’re sure you’re not here?”

It’s a funny question, actually. More than once I’ve landed in a city, spent a couple of hours there, flown off, and forgotten the visit just a few days later. Salt Lake I tend to remember, though. That temple. The byzantine liquor laws and spry old men.

“I’m pretty sure.”

“It was Wendy Jance who spotted you. Downtown. At that restaurant you like that serves the liver.”

“How is she these days?”

“Like you care. Don’t play that game. She’s the same as she was when you stopped calling her: bright, attractive, a little lost, and furious.”

I suppose that it’s time I explain about the women.

There are a lot of them. I credit my looks. This sounds awful, but I’m a handsome man, conventionally proportioned, but with flair. Old tailors love me. They tell me I remind them of men from forty years ago, slim but sturdy, on the small side but broad, with a long inseam. In most ways I have the same body as my father, who never consciously exercised or dieted and yet retained a thoughtless fitness even into his grim, suspicous old age. The farmwives on his gas route were all admirers, waylaying him with cookies and iced drinks while I waited, shy and watchful, in the truck, impressed even then by his patient rural gallantry. At his funeral, freed by the fact that he’d died single, the ladies wept abundantly and frankly, their tears erasing years from their old faces. My mother cried too, but mostly to keep up, I think. Public opinion had it that she’d wronged him. She’d remarried. He hadn’t. She’d prospered. He’d died in debt. Only physically had my father come out ahead.
While she’d blurred away and lost all definition, becoming one of those women who need makeup not to highlight their features but to create them, he’d kept his hair and muscles and blue-green eyes right through the funeral director’s final touch-ups.

My genes only partly account for all the women, though. Sheer availability matters too. I’m out there among them, mixing, every day, eating a spinach salad one table over, changing my return date in the same ticket line. Take Wendy. I met her at the registration desk of the Fort Worth Homestead Suites. The hotel computer had eaten her reservation, an American Legion convention was in town, and she was facing a night without a room when I stepped up with my Premier-Ultra Guest Card. The clerk reversed herself; Wendy got her key. It was only fair that she join me for fillet at the in-house Conestoga Grill, where my mastery of the modest wine list wowed her. Soon, we were talking shop. Her shop: cosmetics. The animal-testing furor. The Asian market. “Organic” versus “natural.” I knew the business. That she lived two doors down from my sister never came up—not until afterwards, while watching pay-per-view, wrapped in a humid polyester sheet, our clothes and papers strewn across the
room like wreckage from a trailer-park tornado. Our parting posture, unconsciously devised while watching Tom Cruise destroy a bio-terror ring, was that of two jaded orgiasts (focus word) putting one over on the Bible Belters.

A few days later Kara called my mobile and said that friend of hers had seen my picture in a family photo album and asked if I ever came to Utah. Subtle. Playing along, I flew to Utah twice that month, saw Wendy both times, then decided to back off when she thrust at me a sheaf of poems about her struggles with her Mormon faith.

She hadn’t said she was a member. It broke the deal. These people believe that in the life to come they’ll rule their own stars and planets as God rules ours. Lori, after she left me, became one, too, switching from short skirts to full-length dresses and marrying a real estate executive who had her pregnant within a couple of months.

My fling with Wendy wasn’t typical. Usually, there’s more romance, a slower buildup. I spot someone, or she spots me, across a buffet table or a conference room. Later, we find ourselves on the same flight and exchange a few words while dawdling in the aisle, mentioning to each other where we’ll be staying. At seven, as both of us step from scalding showers, snug inside freshly laundered terry robes, our hair still fragrant with giveaway shampoo, the telephone rings in one of our hotel rooms. A dinner follows where we compare our schedules and learn that we’ll both be in San Jose on Thursday—or that we can be, if we want to be. The next night, from different hotels, we speak again. For me, no sensation is more intoxicating than lying alone in bed, strange room, strange city, talking to someone I barely know who’s also disoriented and on her own. Her voice becomes my chief reality; lacking other landmarks, I cling to it. And she clings to my voice. Each other is all we have. By
Thursday, as we park our rented Sables in front of a restaurant that neither of us has eaten at but that both of us have read good things about in Great West’s in-flight magazine,
Horizons,
a sense of destiny beckons. Until dessert.

Chance is an erratic matchmaker. Now and then it seats me next to women I wouldn’t dream of approaching on my own. On other occasions it dishes up a Wendy, superficially suitable but with a flaw. And a few times, I fear, it has offered me perfection.

“When will you be in Seattle?” Kara asks.

“I get in Wednesday.”

“Late?”

“Mid-afternoon. But I might have to go to Arizona instead.”

“Here are your instructions. Listening? Go straight to the Pike Street Market—it shuts at six—and order twelve pounds of king salmon, alder-smoked. Send it overnight to Mom’s, but make sure you inspect it first. Look for red, firm meat.”

“I can’t do this over the phone?”

“You have to see it. Make sure it’s good fish.”

“By the weekend it won’t be fresh, though.”

“It’s smoked. It’ll keep. Don’t flake out on me this time. Don’t pull another Santa Fe.”

She wounds me. Santa Fe was a fluke, and not my fault. Our mother had visited a gallery there during one of her winter Winnebago runs with her current husband, the Lovely Man. (So called because he’s small, he hardly speaks, and he has no discernible personality.) She fell in love with a Zuni bracelet there and described it to Julie, who mentioned it to Kara, who ordered me, on my next trip to New Mexico, to buy the thing as a gift from the whole family on my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday. I did my best, but due to a buildup of errors in the description, the piece my mother ultimately received was Hopi, ill-fitting, overpriced, and, as my mother told the Lovely Man (who then told Kara, proving he’s not so lovely), “positively god-awful.”

“Unfair,” I say.