Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles

Author:Jonathan Miles [Miles, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 0547054017
Amazon: B003JTHWAU
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2008-06-02T07:00:00+00:00

"Oh of course," she said, shrugging lightly as if to conceal a dinge of sadness. "We go back and forth sometimes, about Ralph. She thinks it's time for us to let him go. I don't think that's up to us. Who am I to say what's hopeless and what's not? Leave it to the angels."

She asked if I had children. "A daughter," I said, shrugging lightly myself. I gave her the skinniest skinny about that: Speck getting married tomorrow, me trying to get there. The single sentence summary to which this letter and maybe my life is one long blazing footnote. The conversation moved on, nostalgically, smokily, to the good old days of air travel—the regulation era, with its red-eye flights and goopy-but-satiating meals and dapperly dressed travelers and (here comes my two cents) svelte and allegedly immoral stewardesses and rear-of-the-air-craft smoking sections—and then the Munchkin said What the heck and slid another cigarette from her pack. After I'd lit it she extended a hand to me and said, "Margaret."

"Bennie," I said, pumping her plump hand. "Margaret? I was married to a Margaret once." Ha ha, me. Always playing the rogue. Cue a jellybowl laugh from Ed McMahon.

"Well, I hope you were good to her," she said, with what looked like a wink but might also have been a stigmatic tic.

Whoops. How to respond to that one? I stared for a moment, blinking, watching a baggage porter gnaw a fingernail while leaning against his empty cart. I thought I was good. Tried to be. Damn we were lonely people, the two of us. The day after our berserk tryst in my apartment I received a telegram from Margaret in Warsaw: MORE, SHE SAYS, MORE. Who could fail to grin wolfishly after opening that one? Later that night I composed a slapdash poem for her about our night together, as seen from the perspective of one of my sacrificial shirt-buttons. To be honest I didn't remember all that much of the evening—my blackouts were never fully black, more like burning charcoal: some parts black, some parts gray, some parts orange and blistering—but I recalled enough fleshy details for the purposes of light verse.

The letter she wrote back was so deliciously smutty (as opposed to my cutesy Donne-ish ditty) that I felt I should be charged by the minute for reading it. And then rereading it, whew. Before I had time to respond I received another letter from her, this one winsome and chatty and more but not exclusively concerned with matters above-the-waist. Much of it was about the nineteenth-century painter whose work she was in Poland studying (Henryk Rodakowski) and how I resembled one of his subjects—minus, that is, his rabbinical beard, pear-shaped physique, bulbous copper nose, and obvious blighted penury. The eyes, she said. Something about those starving-hound eyes. (Woof, I said to the letter.) She'd made a rubbing of Rodakowski's tombstone while in Krakow, and enclosed a copy of it for me—an adolescent gesture, to be sure, like your

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