She had the window seat next to a man in black jeans and T-shirt. As they were putting their seats into an upright position for takeoff, he asked her if she was from Sydney.
“Yes,” she said in an exasperated tone, without looking at him. He was irrelevant. Didn’t he see that? He was completely irrelevant.
“Ah,” he said sadly, and she was suddenly disgusted by her unnecessary rudeness.
“I’m sorry. I’m going home for a funeral. It’s been a bit stressful.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry. How awful for you.” He was a long, lanky man with a mop of black curly hair and serious eyes behind John Lennon glasses.
It was his voice that did it. Maybe if he’d just had an ordinary voice, they would have spent the rest of the flight in silence. But he had “the voice.” Ah, the voice, her sisters said with understanding when they heard. Not that they went for it themselves, they just recognized it on Lyn’s behalf.
Gemma would say, “The mechanic who serviced my car had that sort of voice you go on about. I gave him your number. He has a girlfriend, but he kept it just in case things didn’t work out. He said it’s good to have a backup.”
She first heard it from her Year Eight Geography teacher. Mr. Gordon was bearded and paunchy, but he spoke about rivers and mountain ranges in a voice with an underlying sweetness. It was perfectly masculine but somehow gentler or softer than the average man’s voice. It made her feel safe.
“My sister’s fiancé was killed in a car accident,” she explained. “They were getting married in six weeks. The invitations were just about to go out.”
He made a “tsk” sound. “That’s terrible.”
Lyn came from a family of poor listeners. If you had something to say, you had to battle constant interruptions, challenges, outright boredom—get on with it—and loud triumph over any trip-ups—Ha! You just said the opposite two seconds ago!
Michael listened to Lyn with unhurried, flattering interest. It was a brand-new experience for her. It made her eloquent.
It was why she fell in love with him, the pure, almost physical pleasure of their conversation—listening to him and having him listen to her.
Not that she fell in love with him immediately. There wasn’t a hint of inappropriate flirtation in their first conversation. He spoke about his wife and little girl and Lyn told him about Hank. But still, it was quite an intimate conversation for two strangers. Perhaps, Lyn always thought afterward, it was the environment—that strange roaring vacuum suspended high above the planet, that peculiarly familiar feeling that you’d always been on this plane and you always would be.
She told him how angry she felt with Marcus for dying so stupidly, so thoughtlessly, so close to the wedding—ruining her sister’s life! Why wasn’t the fool looking when he crossed the road?
“You must think I’m terrible,” she said to Michael, snuggled under her airline blanket, feeling a little drunk on too many liqueurs.
“No,” said Michael. “How hard is it to cross a road?”
“Exactly.”
She told him how weirdly nervous she felt about seeing Gemma, a strange sense of resistance even as she rushed home to be with her. It felt as if Gemma had moved up to a higher, more complex level of human emotions that Lyn couldn’t even hope to understand. She didn’t know the rules. She didn’t know the right thing to say to make it better. It was like Gemma possessed a secret, terrible knowledge that Lyn could only clumsily guess at.
“I’ve always known the right thing to say. I’m good at making people feel better. But nothing is really going to make her feel better, is it? Not for a long, long time. It’s not fair.”
“A friend of mine lost his little boy to leukemia,” said Michael. “I was so frightened of calling him up, I got a migraine. I almost chickened out.”
“But you did it.”
“Oh yeah, I did it.”
And for a minute they both sat silently, trying out other people’s pain, until Michael said, “Mmmm, I think another liqueur might be in order, don’t you?”
Eventually, they both fell asleep, waking up rumpled and sticky-mouthed to the stomach-churning aroma of airplane breakfasts and Australian sunshine streaming through the plane.
They promised each other they’d get together for a drink sometime. He gave her his business card, and she wrote her number on the back of one of his cards.
Lyn looked at the name on the card, as he stood in the aisle reaching easily into the overhead locker for his bags.
“Um,” she said, looking up at him from her seat. “Aren’t you…someone?”
He smiled down at her. She noticed the faintest suggestion of a dimple creasing his left cheek, like an innocent memory from his childhood. “Yup,” he said. “No question about that. I am definitely someone.”
When Cat saw the card, she told Lyn that he was an up-and-coming computer genius, with stacks of money and an ex-model for a wife.
They met for their drink about a month after the flight. Lyn arrived at the city bar with low expectations. No doubt they would find it impossible to replicate the easy intimacy of their conversation on the flight and there would be lots of awkward pauses and a sense of why did we bother?
Instead, the conversation flowed just as seamlessly. She told him about the funeral and Gemma’s strange, white face, how she didn’t want to say one word about how she felt about Marcus. Not one word. And this from a girl who normally shared her innermost thoughts as casually and often as most people talked about the weather. Lyn had bought a book on the Stages of Grief to try to understand.
He told her about taking his daughter kayaking on Middle Harbour and how his wife was renovating their house for the third time, which Michael was doing his best to understand too.
She told him about an idea she had for home delivering gourmet breakfasts.
He told her how he was planning to get in on the ground floor with some computer networking phenomenon they were calling the “Internet.”
When they stood up to say good-bye, Lyn thought to herself with satisfaction, Well, it just goes to show it is possible to have a friendship with an interesting, intelligent (actually rather attractive) man without that distracting sexual element.
Next thing she knew Michael had his arms around her and they were kissing in a way that had a very distracting sexual element.