“T ell them they should turn around and go back for my stomach, it’s lying on the floor at the airport.” Mama took a deep breath and sighed disapprovingly. “If God had meant us to be up here, we’d have feathers,” she philosophized.
“Just relax,” I advised her.
“How should I relax dangling my feet who knows how many thousand feet up in the air with only the clouds for a rug? That Henry Ford—-he was an anti-Semite, you know?—no wonder he comes up with a contraption man should flap his arms and fly around like a sparrow.”
“Wright.” I corrected her.
“It’s no good agreeing with me. It wouldn’t make me any happier up here.”
“I wasn’t agreeing with you. I was trying to tell you it wasn’t Hemy Ford who invented the airplane. It was Wright, the brothers, Wilbur and Orville, the two of them.”
“If you’re asking me, two Wrights made a wrong!”
“If you say so.” I gave up on the discussion and started to light my cigarette.
“You shouldn’t smoke. It will aggravate your macka.”
“My what?”
“The boil on your behind. Nicotine will make it swell.”
“It isn’t a boil; it was only a goose pimple from the cold.”
“A canker!”
“A pimple.” I compromised. “Just a very small pimple.”
“I didn’t forget.” She fumbled in her handbag and held up the icepick triumphantly. “See? It has to be tended to.”
“Later. Not now. Not here.”
“Just as soon as we get to Miami,” she promised. “First thing when we land, I’ll turn you over on my lap and we’ll lance it.”
I wondered if it would be possible to bail out over Tampa. “Why don’t you try to take a nap?” I suggested. “It’ll make the time pass faster.”
“You think I could sleep up here with the angels? You saw that pilot driving the plane? A boy! He couldn’t be more than thirty, if that. You think I could just go to sleep and trust him, a boy like that should know what he’s doing? Believe me, I wouldn’t shut my eyes until we’re on the ground again!”
Five minutes later she was snoring softly beside me. I tilted the seat back and closed my own eyes. But I couldn’t go to sleep. My mind was too filled with considerations of just what might lie ahead of me.
Why, suddenly, months after that time in Saigon, should Randolph P. Austin, toilet tycoon, call on me for help? With all his money and prestige and influence, why should he need me? What could he possibly want that required my talents? And why all the rush?
Well, I supposed I’d know the answers soon enough. Meanwhile, my mind was distracted from the questions by a conversation going on in the seat behind me. It was shared by a suburban-looking man about my age and a slightly younger blonde woman, fresh from the beauty parlor and bulgy around the hips.
“Henry, this girdle is killing me,” she was complaining.
“If you hadn’t waited until the last minute, you wouldn’t be having problems getting into your clothes.”
“If I’d gone down earlier, before the season, everybody would have guessed. Everybody knows why a woman goes to Puerto Rico that early. The whole neighborhood would be talking. It would have been as obvious as crabgrass, and the gossip would have spread even faster.”
“I still say that’s no reason to wait until it’s almost too late. Look at the trouble. Usually you can fly straight to San Juan, but because you had to pick the height of the tourist season, we end up flying to Miami and having to change planes. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s not my fault. The airline didn’t have anything else available. But I must say I don’t care for your attitude, Henry.”
“I’m sorry.” Henry sighed. “I guess I’m just feeling guilty. Joyce gave me a hard time this morning.”
“What does she have to complain about? I’d like to have it as good as she does. A husband who gives her a real mink coat for Christmas! You know what George gave me? Six pairs of stockings! Every year since we got married, that’s what he gives me. For my birthday, for our anniversary, for Christmas-eighteen pairs a year. I’m drowning in stockings, but I don’t get so much as a lousy rabbit fur while your wife gets mink. And she has the gall to give you a hard time! About what, I’d like to know!”
“She wanted to come with me. And it’s really not so unreasonable, you know. I mean, every year for eight years I’ve been telling her I’m going to San Juan on business and refusing to take her along. She’s beginning to get suspicious.”
“Well, next year maybe we’ll go someplace else. Bermuda, maybe.”
“Can you get an abortion in Bermuda?”
“Maybe next year I won’t need an abortion.”
“Fat chance!” Henry grunted. “Every year for eight years I’ve been going through this bit with you. Why should next year be different?”
“It’s not my fault! Every May you get so drunk at the first Kiwanis picnic that you don’t even give me a chance to do what I should do to be safe. So I get knocked up and we have to go to San Juan to have it taken care of. If you were more careful, then maybe I’d get to spend my vacation somewhere else. Besides, Joyce isn’t the only one who’s getting suspicious. George is beginning to notice I get plump every July. He’s also started to suggest that maybe it would be nice if we didn’t take separate vacations one year. He says he’d like to see San Juan for a change instead of being stuck in Merrick, Long Island.
“But he hasn’t shown any signs of being suspicious about us, has he, Marilyn?” Henry sounded worried.
“No. He’s always talking about how much he likes you, Henry. I think it’s because he always beats you at golf.
“I let him beat me.” Henry corrected her. “Anyway, I’m glad to know he’s not suspicious. I have nightmares sometimes about George and Joyce putting two and two together—your vacations and my business trips--and what a mess we’d be in then.”
“We’ve been managing it for eight years. Why start worrying now?”
“I suppose you’re right. I just wish we weren’t cutting it so close this time. If we should be delayed by one of those Miami hurricanes or anything, it might be too late for you to have the operation by the time we got to San Juan.”
“There isn’t going to be any hurricane. There isn’t going to be any delay. Stop worrying, Henry. Just relax.”
“All right, Marilyn. Here comes the stewardess for the drink orders. I guess I’ll have a martini. You want anything ?”
“Never again! If it hadn’t been for those damn Kiwanis martinis, I wouldn’t be in this predicament!”
The stewardess was standing over me now. I opened my eyes as she spoke. She was right off the Rheingold Girl assembly line: pretty face, good figure, and a toothpaste-commercial personality.
“Would you care for a cocktail, sir?” she asked me.
“No, he wouldn’t!” Mama spoke without opening her eyes. “As much as he drinks with his kidneys, he could miss one it would be like vitamins for his whole system.”
I mouthed the words “scotch” and “double” at the stewardess, and she nodded her understanding and made a notation on her pad. When she returned with the cocktail, Mama was snoring again. I sipped my drink quietly and then leaned back and closed my eyes again.
“Are you a homosexual?” My eyelids popped open to find a small boy with very large horn-rimmed glasses planted in the aisle beside my seat. He was staring straight at me. He repeated the question. “Are you a homosexual?”
“Look, kid,” I told him, “I’m Steve Victor, the man from O. R. G. Y. I ask the questions; I don’t answer them!”
“You’re embarrassed,” he decided. “My question embarrasses you.”
“I am not embarrassed,” I assured him. But my voice had gone up and my face turned red when the people turned around in their seats to look at us.