Wit and Wisdom
by Beth Broderick
The young man barely looked up. He took his seat beside me, with nary a glance in my direction. He immediately opened his small portable laptop computer and fixed a dark screen over the top of it. Perhaps to reduce the glare? To take the heat out of the blue light that screens shed, which is said to be bedeviling our eyesight and disturbing our sleep? Or to ensure privacy while working in a public space? Who knows? He dutifully tucked it away for the few minutes it took the plane to reach a stable altitude and reoriented his laser-like focus toward his phone.
He was young, just entering his thirties, and quite handsome, with dark curls tousled over one eye. The shoes he was wearing said ‘straight guy,’ the pants leaned ‘gay.’ I find it impossible to tell with young people nowadays, and who cares? I say let them be polyamorous, non-binary, sexually fluid, and whatever else they want to be. It’s their world now and they should live in it and love in it, however they choose.
The minute we attained cruising level, the laptop roared back to life, the screen-darkening apparatus was set back in place,and his full attention returned to his work. He held the thing on his knees to accommodate the long reach of his arms. I watched in awe as his fingers flew across that keyboard.
I was tired, heading back to LA from a modeling job in San Antonio. It was a fun shoot, but a demanding one. I planned to have a glass of white with the dinner I had pre-selected and take a good long nap. I had brought along a magazine I almost never read. I am obsessed with periodicals about cooking but had already read all of the latest, so Vanity Fair would have to do. One thing for certain: It would definitely ease me into a gentle airplane goodnight. I used to love reading about rich people’s problems in the old days when the work of Dominick Dunne reigned supreme, but now I am bored by it all. I simply do not care about how many Rolexes were taken during the heist that shocked Beverly Hills or wherever the haves hang out.
The dinner came and the young man next to me just worked around it, not touching his food. He tucked his arms beneath the flimsy pull-out tray that held it and kept up a furious pace of typing. I dug into the Asian chicken thing and even allowed myself several bites of the cookie that came with it, a rare indulgence. I soon put my napkin on top of it to signal to my body that that was enough of that. One thing about modeling at my age is there is not much cookie-eating involved. I can gain a pound just looking at one.
When the stewardess came to clear my tray, my seatmate had not looked up. Honestly, it seemed a bit worrying, but not really my business. I turned off the light above my seat and settled back for some shuteye.
When I woke, the young man had his arms folded tight across his chest, the laptop finally closed. I glanced up just in time to see a tear roll down the side of his face. He hugged himself tighter to stop it, but another fell and then another. He covered his face with one hand and looked straight down into his lap. I pretended not to notice, trying to give him the space to collect himself.
I have been there. Many times.
Tears falling in a steady stream all the way from Texas to California as I tried to will my mother to wait for me. More tears in the taxi as my sister held the phone to her ear.
“I’m almost there, Mama. Wait for me, okay? You have to wait for me.”
She could not answer me, but she must have heard because she waited, drawing her last breath in my arms just thirty minutes after I arrived.
I was once heading home after a horrible work experience when I completely melted down in the security line.
It was a TV show. The man playing opposite me in that mini-series-ish kind of thing, (I’m still not entirely sure what that show was), had made it known that he felt I was too old to be his love interest. This three- inches-shorter-than-me, roughly-my-age, hair-challenged, giant-bellied fellow thought himself so much of a catch, that a prettier, younger costar was in order. Ewwww!
The only thing to do of course, per the production, the only way to remedy the situation, to relieve the portly fellow of the imposition of my ancientness, was to kill me. So, I had lain on the floor in my death scene while a day player pretended to beat my head in, the baseball bat landing with thud after thud mere inches from my face. It was unpleasant, but honestly, I was relieved to be done with that project. The little troll of an actor was a nasty piece of work, and I looked forward to never seeing him again.
I went back to the hotel that night, had a glass of wine, and went to bed. I thought I was fine. I thought I was completely in control of how I felt about it all until the next day at the airport, when the woman behind the screening booth asked:
“Is there anything in your pockets, ma’am?”
I looked at her and burst into a bowlful of tears, of wild hot sobbing. She was horrified.
“It’s okay, ma’am. We have to ask. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s okay, ma’am. You’re okay”
It was no use. I was by that time officially a crazy airport crying lady. I raced to the ladies’ room and barricaded myself into a stall, the shock and trauma wracking my body.
Our feelings do not always announce themselves in convenient moments. I’ve been there.
The young man was losing the battle for control. I reached over and put my arm around him.
“Hey. You, okay?” I asked.
He looked at me with what seemed like relief, perhaps he was grateful to be done with trying to pretend that he was not having a terrible time of things.
“Yes. Yes. Really, I’m fine.” he said. He was not of course. Not at all “fine.”
“I know. I am sure you are, but sometimes it’s hard. I get it. I understand.”
“We … it’s over. He said staring straight ahead. We have to divide it all up now and it’s just … going to be so awful. I just…. It’s really over.”
The tears kept coming.
“Breathe,” I said, “In through your nose. Out through your mouth. In through your nose. Out through your mouth.”
I did it with him. We sat there, breathing in and out for a good while, and finally it started to help. When he was at last able to speak, he flashed me a gorgeous smile.
“I am sorry I have been so … I am usually a bit more, you know polite.” He managed another rueful grin. “Charming even.”
“I don’t doubt it, but please don’t worry about it. You were keeping busy for a good reason, and it actually worked for a while. You gotta give yourself that.”
“Yeah,” He shook his head. “Almost made it through this.”
We were instructed to prepare for landing and did so accordingly.
“There is only one way through this kind of thing and that is straight through it. Right into the heat and the hurt and the hell of it. When my first marriage failed, I was truly devastated. It felt like such a public display of my inadequacy, proof perfect of my stupidity, my un-loveableness. But then, ultimately, it was helpful. I didn’t die. What I thought was the worst thing that could happen did happen, and I was okay. I was actually more confident after that, like, “Go ahead, Life… go ahead and bring it, you bastard; I can take whatever you are giving out. It doesn’t feel like it now, but I promise you it will be fine.”
I did not say any of that. What I said was:
“You will make it through.”
The bell rang, indicating that we were allowed to get up and retrieve our things. He moved his legs to the side so I could slip past him and then got up behind me. The fellow across the way was kind enough to fetch my suitcase and backpack. I put myself together and started to head out, but then turned back and reached for the young man’s hand and looked into his eyes. He let me hold him for a minute and then we broke apart and headed off toward our respective fates.
In through your nose, out through your mouth, young man. You’ve got this.
On we go …
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Altitude Attitudes