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As happens when people are incapable of loving each other, they would divert this love toward a common place or object. The
airport, as it happens. They dressed not quite identically and left a child at home. The lounge lay just beyond the baggage check, its
name and theme derived from a popular television show, a show toward which they diverted love on a weekly basis. For once they
were able to get a booth by the windows. The sun had gone down but the exterior lighting was strong enough to obliterate all
reflection. The catch was that the windows overlooked a parking lot for service vehicles; you'd really have to knuckle your nose
against the cold thrumming glass to glimpse a runway.
 "I thought we'd be able to see," she said.
"Well, it's the window or the TV," said her husband.
"I'm tired of it anymore."
"Isn't there a new one in the new wing?"
Their feelings for the moving sidewalk can be inferred from the greater but inclusive love of drinking at airports.
She had to have her purse x-rayed. He kept setting off the metal detector. After the second time they pulled him to the side and
went over him with the wand. He took things out of his pockets but the wand kept accusing him. It made a tasteful pleasant sound like
a doorbell. Each time it went off, the woman with it had him stand in a slightly different position on the carpet. It got confusing, he'd
been drinking. The woman with the wand was very patient but finally she had to get someone.
He kept looking toward the men's room. His wife turned up her collar, pulled her hat brim down over her eyes and went inside.
As solemn as Sunday in there, everything so clean and pale and brand new. She chose a stall, closed the door, pulled down her
pants. She didn't feel the need to protect herself. There was a small round hole in the partition to her left. She peered in, saw another
empty stall. She closed her eyes and heard men groaning ecstatically. Someone entered the stall on the other side. She heard two
voices, a man and a child--a little girl, she decided after a moment. The girl wanted to get off right away.
"Did you do anything?" the man asked. The girl wanted to wipe, she wanted to play with the paper.
"After you've number-oned," the man said. "You have to do something."
She thought she could still hear the wand, its pleasant welcoming sound, so happy to make you stay. She heard herself emptying
herself, for the both of them.
"Look how soft your skin is," the man said. "This is how you smelled when you were first born."
There was no button, no handle, no foot pedal; the toilet flushed itself when you stood up. She thrust herself into a urinal in a way
that seemed right, next to a big man wearing a motorcycle jacket, holding a briefcase with his other hand.
"Hell's Angels' accountant?" she said into the wall. They stood there a long time. She made her voice deeper. "Stagefright?"
"Excuse me?"
It flushed when you stepped away, no matter who you were. The water ran, the hot air blew. You didn't have to touch anything.
She took it all in. The big man was still at the urinal, his shoulder trembling. She used her own voice now.
"Shake it more than once you're playing with it."
"Excuse me?"
The new lounge was adjacent to a United Airlines gate so the view was optimal, but all the booths were taken so they sat at the
bar. Drinks were served by a pair of fiftyish women in buckskin skirts, in boots and cowboy hats. They looked like aging country
singers. A plane had just taxied in. A woman stepped out of the bar and checked the gate. She came back and sipped her beer. You
couldn't leave the bar with your drink. She checked the gate again, came back and drank at her beer.
"She's not putting her life on hold for anyone," he observed.
"They'll just have to jump her day while it's moving," his wife agreed. She looked at the embroidered vests, the string tie and neck
scarf, and wondered why a country-and-western theme for this particular lounge. She wondered about the music.
"Isn't that Ring of Fire?" she asked.
"I could kill that jukebox," her husband said. They still hadn't been served but they were in no hurry; a beer here was three and
a-half bucks, a real drink four.
"See that guy over there?" he said, pointing as discreetly as he was capable at a man standing with a woman at a small high table.
They looked like business people.
"What about him?"
"What do you think what about him?"
"Looks like his own to me." They heard jet engines and he squeezed her knee.
"Look at the back," he resumed. He drew her attention to the way the hairs lifted away from the neck and yet pointed stiffly straight
down. "And you can make out two different shades."
"Maybe," his wife said, but she was looking at the waitress who was placing cocktail napkins in front of them. She looked familiar.
She looked like someone who might have worked at the other lounge but hadn't quite fit in.
"Whiskey sour," the waitress said to her, smiling at her, nodding. She looked at him the same way. "Jack. Neat."
They made a point of ordering Bloody Marys. When the waitress had gone his wife whispered, "We've been remembered."
"How about a little vodka with your tomato juice?" he said.
*
Because they couldn't love each other, they directed their love toward the same automobile. They put a child in the backseat and
drove to the airport. The access road running alongside the river became a patch of gravel, ran into a barbed-wire fence. The day was
a bright clean window. The fence paralleled the main runway. The only other vehicle, a station wagon, was parked at the other end of
the gravel. The child wore a kind of harness. They tethered it to the front bumper and climbed onto the roof of the car, legs flattening
against the windshield. They had all of it now. They had it in waves.
"What are the odds?" she yelled. "One in a million?" A pair of cheap binoculars hung around her neck.
"More like a hundred thousand," her husband yelled back. "Maybe in ten thousand."
Small red berries drew the child to the holly along the fence. He tried but couldn't reach them because of the tether.
"Are we far enough?" she asked.
"It's out of our hands."
"What about flaming debris? The shock wave?"
"What about sharks? What about lightning?" He shrugged vastly, in proportion. "Accidents of God."
"Hell, what about getting mugged." She nudged him, indicated the family from the station wagon: they'd brought lawn chairs.
"Maybe next time," her husband said. There was beer in a cooler in the trunk. A bottle of something special was buried in the ice
under the beer, in the event of the one-in-whatever.
A plane landed and flushed a jack rabbit in the field between the fence and the runway. "Doggie!" The child squealed and jumped
up and down, pointing, straightening the line. "Doggie!" You could barely hear him. The car rocked slightly with small necessary joy, or
with the wind.
Across the access road from the airport were a boat ramp and a filling station. The harbor master's office. A pair of goats were tied
to a bollard next to the bait store, one of them chewed on a root.
The pupil of a goat's eye is elongate like a cat's, but if you look closely you'll see that it's in the horizontal position, and if you look
closer still you'll see that it's less gracefully shaped, more of a ragged slot, dirty yellow. And you'll see that the white of a goat's eye is
all black.
"Better than lounges," the child's mother said. "Better than you-know-what."
"What?" her husband said. "It usually happens at takeoffs or landings."
"Coming and going." It was time to raise your voice again. Time to cross your fingers. "Next time let's bring sandwiches."
"What?"
"I'll bet you this is the one," she yelled.
"I won't take your money."
"This is the one, I can just feel it."
"What?" They could feel it. They could feel each other all over. The wind screamed in her hair. Then it was time to get the beer,
and her husband sighed. If this didn't pay off he would after a while take the kid across the road to see the goats. Smell the doggie
and see its teeth.
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