Reflections

Journey Into Night

Business-class emotions.

by David Sedaris December 17, 2007

The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/17/071217fa_fact_sedaris

The night flight to Paris leaves J.F.K. at 7 P.M. and arrives at de Gaulle the next day at about 8:45 A.M. French time. Between takeoff and landing, there’s a brief parody of an evening: dinner is served, the trays are cleared, and four hours later it’s time for breakfast. The idea is to trick the body into believing it has passed a night like any other—that your unsatisfying little nap was actually sleep and now you are rested and deserving of an omelette.

Hoping to make the lie more convincing, many passengers prepare for bed. I’ll watch them line up outside the bathroom, some holding toothbrushes, some dressed in slippers or loose-fitting pajama-type outfits. Their slow-footed padding gives the cabin the feel of a hospital ward: the dark aisles, corridors; the flight attendants, nurses. The hospital feeling grows even stronger once you leave coach. Up front, where the seats recline almost flat, like beds, the doted-on passengers lie under their blankets and moan. I’ve heard, in fact, that the airline staff often refers to the business-class section as “the I.C.U.,” because the people there demand such constant attention. They want what their superiors are getting in first class, so they complain incessantly, hoping to get bumped up.

There are only two classes on the airline I normally take between France and the United States—coach and something they call Business Elite. The first time I sat there, I was flown to America and back for a book tour. “Really,” I kept insisting, “there’s no need.” I found the whole “first-to-board” business a little embarrassing, but then they brought me a bowl of hot nuts and I began to soften. Pampering takes some getting used to. A flight attendant addresses me as “Mr. Sedaris,” and I feel sorry that she’s forced to memorize my name rather than, say, her granddaughter’s cell-phone number. On this particular airline, though, they do it in such a way that it seems perfectly natural, or at least it does after a time.

“May I bring you a drink to go with those warm nuts, Mr. Sedaris?” the woman looking after me asked—this as the people in coach were still boarding. The looks they gave me as they passed were the looks I give when the door of a limousine opens. You always expect to see a movie star, or, at the very least, someone better dressed than you, but time and time again it’s just a sloppy nobody. Thus the look, which translates to “Fuck you, Sloppy Nobody, for making me turn my head.”

On all my subsequent flights, the Business Elite section was a solid unit, but on this particular plane it was divided into two sections: four rows up front and two in the back. The flight attendant assured everyone in my section that although we were technically in the back, we shouldn’t think of it as the back. We had the same rights and privileges as the passengers ahead of us. Yet still they were ahead of us, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d been somehow favored.

On the way to New York, I sat beside a bearded Frenchman, who popped a pill shortly after takeoff and was out until we landed. On the leg back, there was no one beside me, at least not for the first half hour. Then a flight attendant knelt in the aisle beside my seat and asked if I might do her a favor—that’s how they talk in Business Elite. “I’m wondering, Mr. Sedaris, if you might do me a favor?”

Chipmunk-like, my cheeks packed with warm nuts, I cocked my head.

“I’ve got a passenger a few rows up and his crying is disturbing the people around him. Do you think it would be O.K. if he moved and sat here?”

The woman was blond and heavily made up. Glasses hung from a chain around her neck, and as she gestured to the empty window seat beside me I got a pleasant whiff of what smelled like oatmeal cookies. “I believe he’s Polish,” she whispered. “That is to say, I think he’s from Poland. The country.”

“Is he a child?” I asked, and the flight attendant told me no. “Is he drunk?” It didn’t matter one way or the other. I was just curious.

Again, she said no. “His mother just died and he’s on his way to her funeral.”

“So people are upset because he’s crying over his dead mother?”

“That’s the situation,” she told me.

I’d once read where a first-class passenger complained—threatened to sue, if I remember correctly—because the blind person next to him was travelling with a Seeing Eye dog. He wasn’t allergic, this guy. Labrador retrievers on the street didn’t bother him, but he hadn’t paid thousands of dollars to sit next to one, or at least that was his argument. If that had seemed the last word in assholiness, this was a close second.

I said that of course the man could sit beside me, and the flight attendant disappeared into the darkness, returning a few minutes later with the grieving passenger.

“Thank you,” she mouthed.

And I said, “No problem.”

The Polish man might have been in his mid-forties but seemed older, just as people in my parents’ generation had. Foreign blood, or an abundance of responsibility, had robbed him of the prolonged adolescence currently enjoyed by Americans of the same age, so his face, though unlined, seemed older than mine, more used. His eyes were red and swollen from crying, and his nose, which was large and many-faceted, looked as if it had been roughly carved from wood and not yet sanded smooth. In the dim light, he resembled one of those elaborate, handcrafted bottle stoppers—the kindly peasant or good-natured drunk who tips his hat when you pull the string. After settling in, the man looked out the darkened window. Then he bit his lower lip, covered his face with his remarkably large hands, and proceeded to sob, deeply. I felt that I should say something, but what? And how? Perhaps it would be better, less embarrassing for him, if I were to pretend that he wasn’t crying—to ignore him, basically. And so I did.

The Polish man didn’t want dinner, just waved it away with those king-size mitts of his, but I could feel him watching as I cut into my herb-encrusted chicken, most likely wondering how anyone could carry on at a time like this. That’s how I felt when my mother died. The funeral took place on a Saturday afternoon in November. It was unseasonably warm that day, even for Raleigh, and returning from the church we passed people working on their lawns as if nothing had happened. One guy even had his shirt off. “Can you beat that?” I said to my sister Lisa, not thinking of all the funeral processions that had passed me over the years—me laughing, me throwing stones at signs, me trying to stand on my bicycle seat. Now here I was eating—and it wasn’t bad, either. The best thing about this particular airline is that after dinner they offer you a sundae. The vanilla ice cream is in the bowl already, but you can choose from any number of toppings. I order the caramel and chopped nuts and the flight attendant spoons them on before my eyes. “Is that enough sauce, Mr. Sedaris?” she’ll ask, and “Are you sure you don’t want whipped cream?” It would be years before I worked up the courage to ask for seconds, and, when I finally did, I felt like such a dope. “Do you think, um . . . I mean, is it possible to have another one of those?”

“Well, of course it is, Mr. Sedaris. Have a third, if you like!”

That’s Business Elite for you. Spend eight thousand dollars on a ticket and, if you want an extra thirteen cents’ worth of ice cream, all you have to do is ask. It’s like buying a golf cart and having a few tees thrown in, but it still works. “Golly,” I say. “Thanks!”

In the years before I asked for seconds, my sundae would be savored—each crumb of cashew or walnut eaten separately, the way a bird might. After those were gone, I would recline a bit and start in on the caramel. By the time the ice cream itself was finished, I’d be stretched out flat, watching a movie on my private screen. The control panels for the seats are situated on a shared armrest and it would take me a good three or four flights before I got the hang of them. On this trip, for instance, I kept mashing the buttons, wondering why they failed to work: feet up, feet down, head back, head forward. I was two seconds from calling the flight attendant when I looked to my right and saw the Polish man keening and bucking against his will. It was then that I realized I had the wrong control panel. “Sorry about that,” I said. And he held up his pan-size hand, the way you do when you mean “No hard feelings.”

When my empty bowl was taken away, I leafed through the in-flight magazine, biding my time until my neighbor’s dizziness wore off and he could fall asleep. In an effort to appear respectful, I’d already missed the first movie cycle, but I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out. Up ahead, in the cheerful part of Business Elite, I heard someone laugh. It wasn’t the practiced chuckle you offer in response to a joke but something more genuine, a bark almost. It’s the noise one makes when watching stupid movies on a plane, movies you’d probably never laugh at in the theatre. I think it’s the thinness of the air that heightens your reactions—and not just to comedy, either.

Take my seatmate. The man was crying again, not loudly but steadily, and I wondered, perhaps unfairly, if he wasn’t overdoing it a bit. Stealing a glance at his blocky, tear-stained profile, I thought back to when I was fifteen and a girl in my junior high died of leukemia, or “ ‘Love Story’ disease,” as it was often referred to then. The principal made the announcement and I, along with the rest of my friends, fell into a great show of mourning. Group hugs, bouquets laid near the flagpole. I can’t imagine what it would have been like had we actually known her. Not to brag, but I think I took it hardest of all. “Why her and not me?” I wailed.

“Funny,” my mother would say, “but I don’t remember you ever mentioning anyone named Monica.”

My friends were a lot more understanding, especially Barbara, who, a week after the funeral, announced that maybe she would kill herself as well.

None of us reminded her that Monica had died of a terminal illness, as, in a way, that didn’t matter anymore. The point was that she was gone, and our lives would never be the same: we were people who knew people who died. This is to say that we had been touched by tragedy, and had been made special by it. By all appearances, I was devastated, but in fact I had never been so happy in my life.

The next time someone died, it was a true friend, a young woman named Dana, who was hit by a car during our first year of college. My grief was genuine, yet still, no matter how hard I fought, there was an element of showmanship to it, the hope that someone might say, “You look like you just lost your best friend.”

Then I could say, “As a matter of fact, I did,” my voice cracked and anguished.

It was as if I’d learned to grieve by watching television: here you cry, here you throw yourself upon the bed, here you look in the mirror and notice how good you look with a tear-stained face.

Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am. This Polish man, for instance. Given the time it would take him to buy a ticket and get to J.F.K., his mother would have been dead for at least six hours, maybe longer. Wasn’t he over it yet? I mean, really, who were these tears for? It was as if he were saying, “I loved my mother a lot more than you loved yours.” No wonder his former seatmate had complained. The guy was so competitive, so self-righteous, so, well, over the top.

Another bark of laughter from a few rows up and it occurred to me that perhaps my sympathy was misplaced. Perhaps those tears of his were the by-product of guilt rather than sorrow. I envisioned a pale, potato-nosed woman, a tube leaking fluids into her arm. Calls were placed, expensive ones, to her only son in the United States. “Come quick,” she said, but he was too caught up in his own life. Such a hectic time. So many things to do. His wife was getting her stripper’s license. He’d been asked to speak at his son’s Alateen meeting. “Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll come at the end of dog-racing season.” And then . . . this. She rides to her death on a lumpy gurney and he flies in Business Elite to her funeral. The man killed his mother with neglect and because of that I can’t watch a movie on a plane?

I pulled my private screen from its hiding place in my armrest, and had just slipped on my headphones when the flight attendant came by. “Are you sure I can’t get you something to eat, Mr. . . . ?” She looked down at her clipboard and made a sound like she was gargling with stones.

The Polish man shook his head no, and she regarded me with disappointment, as if it had been my job to stoke his appetite. I thought you were different, her eyes seemed to say.

I wanted to point out that at least I hadn’t complained. I hadn’t disrespected his grief by activating my screen, either, but I did once she’d retreated back into the darkness. Of the four movies playing, I had already seen three. The other was called “Down to Earth,” and starred Chris Rock as an aspiring standup comic. One day, he gets hit and killed by a truck and, after a short spell in Heaven, he’s sent back among the living in the body of an elderly white man. The reviews had been tepid at best, but I swear I’ve never seen anything funnier. I tried not to laugh, but that’s a losing game if ever there was one. This I learned when I was growing up. I don’t know why it was, exactly, but nothing irritated my father quite like the sound of his children’s happiness. Group crying he could stand, but group laughter was asking for it, especially at the dinner table.

The problem was that there was so much to laugh at, particularly during the years that our Greek grandmother lived with us. Had we been older, it might have been different. “The poor thing has gas,” we might have said. For children, though, nothing beats a flatulent old lady. What made it all the crazier was that she wasn’t embarrassed by it—no more than our collie, Dutchess, was. Here it sounded like she was testing out a chainsaw, yet her face remained inexpressive and unchanging.

“Something funny?” our father would ask us, as if he hadn’t heard, as if his chair, too, had not vibrated in the aftershock. “You think something’s funny, do you?”

If keeping a straight face was difficult, saying “No” was so exacting that it caused pain.

“So you were laughing at nothing?”

“Yes,” we would say. “At nothing.”

Then would come another mighty rip, and what was once difficult would now be impossible. My father kept a heavy serving spoon next to his plate, and I can’t remember how many times he brought it down on my head.

“You still think there’s something to laugh about?”

Strange that being walloped with a heavy spoon made everything seem funnier, but there you have it. My sisters and I would be helpless, doubled over, milk spraying out of our mouths and noses, the force all the stronger for having been bottled up. There were nights when the spoon got blood on it—nights when hairs would stick to the blood—but still our grandmother farted, and still we laughed until the walls shook.

Could that really have been forty years ago? The thought of my sisters and me, so young then and so untroubled, was sobering, and within a minute, Chris Rock or no Chris Rock, I was the one crying on the night flight to Paris. It wasn’t my intention to steal anyone’s thunder; a minute or two was all I needed. But, in the meantime, here we were: two grown men in roomy seats, each blubbering in his own élite puddle of light. ♦