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Page 26.
Scene 8. JFK Traveling Blues
 Jack and Minica shared a taxi to Tweed-New Haven Airport. They took a hop across Long Island Sound to JFK International on a twin-prop Bombardier 402 seating seventy passengers.
At JFK, they kissed goodbye with fondness and regret for a long time amid steel and glass terminals. Passengers and commerce of the world came and went around them. Great aircraft with tail insignia of corporate and national empires thundered in and out through a drizzly, adventure-promising atmosphere.
"Maybe one day you'll settle down, Jack." Then she hugged him fiercely, realizing what she'd said. "Take good care, sweetie."
He let him hold her, feeling dull inside.
He saw Minica safely off at the British Airways terminal, bound for Frankfurt and Heidelberg.
He was two hours early for the call to the boarding area, so he browsed the airport's digital shops for decent movies, music, or a good story to read.
Jack browsed through a literal shopping mall, which glittered with lights and wrapped a person in music. It wasn't quite Christmas season yet, nor even Thanksgiving, but the first inklings of Hallow E'en were in the air. Horrible music and chill sounds on dozens of little midi speakers filled the air. Children flew about like bats, supervised by parents or nannies.
Jack at first browsed aimlessly, just glad to be lost and anonymous among people who were not trying to kill him.
Along the way, he dropped his elastic bandage in a waste basket.
In the most expensive electronics catalog of all, he found just the right gift to ship home ahead of himself. It should arrive next day or the next day after. It was huge, and would make quite a splash. He couldn't wait for his loved ones to open the package.
Gleefully, rubbing his hands together, he went looking for a bite to eat.
Jack sat for several hours in the public lounge of Southwest Airlines. He had a ticket—carte blanche—for First Class, funded partially by Compass News Corporation and from his own personal fortune of several millions of dollars. Much as he found air travel uncomfortable and tedious, he could enjoy it under the right circumstances, which usually meant either a woman, a long poker game, or a good book—or some combination of all three.
A certain sour, existential feeling returned, and he could not shake it. He had killed a man last night, even if the man had first tried to kill him. Putting Minica and Claire at risk still made Jack want to take the man out of the morgue, and kill him several more times. Nevertheless, the act of killing in anger always left too much sick, negative energy. This very anger was a toxic quality he wished he could lose. Rage sickened a man. He thought of Master Win at Compass News, and ran mentally through the appropriate calming exercises from Win Sun.
He still felt jangled. His circuits were fried. A double Irish single grain whiskey seemed in order, so he found a dark corner in an already dimly, reddish-lit pub in the concourse. The thunder of airplanes was muffled here. A traveler could forget the noise and bustle of the airport. A waiter named Mick brought his drink, and they joked briefly that whiskey—from the Gaelic use bertha—meant water of life. On that note, for a chaser, Jack also ordered a mug of German Becks, not in the frosty green bottle but foamy from the tap, since the Germans religiously view beer as 'liquid bread' and sacred to human life. If you said 'thirst' or Durst in Germany—in dialects, Ericht—someone would empathize with your existential crisis and hand you legally pure Bier.
He watched the clock and kept an ear out for his pre-boarding announcement. He watched a football game on the TV above the bar. Through a remote plate-glass window, he saw huge passenger jet tails like shark fins crawling in the drizzly soup outside. He slowly savored his water of life, chased by a briskly refreshing mouthfuls of Becks—much as a gourmet, eating Japanese sushi, intersperses each tiny course with a palate-cleansing pickled ginger.
Jack had few male friends in life, save a few mentor types like Master Win at the Compass News spiritual retreat and martial arts center. He had a few drinking buddies, fishing pals, and guys he knew at the shooting range—mostly in D.C. or Virginia—but his soul mates were women like Minica and a few others around the world. He made a mental note to send a card to Xuē. Maybe she would come spend a few days with him in Southern California or Las Vegas.
Meeting his women involved happenstance, as with his male cronies, but he enjoyed a far deeper bond with them. He was solicitous of his female friends, but was afraid, with good reason, to jeopardize them by being too close too long. Some called him a lone wolf, but those who knew him better might compare him with one of those chocolate coins covered with a shiny yellow foil that you got as a kid…hard and shiny on the outside, but soft and melting on the inside. The taste of Dr. Dominica Albrisi lingered in his soul like a fine after-dinner cordial.
Airport concourses were a great place for people watching, except that you grew tired of too many women stepping smartly about on high heels, with their luggage on rollers, too many lives in arrest as people watched screens above their seats for arrival and departure times. Airport lounges could be melancholy caves of introspection, as well.
There she was, with her back to him, drinking coffee in a neighboring food court—Catherine Dorsey. Jack stayed glued to his seat. His heart seemed paralyzed, as if time had stopped. He could not take his eyes off of her.
There were casual women, seekers who sought him the way one steps over stones while crossing a stream (so Master Win might put it). There were a dozen or so wonderful old gloves like Minica. The ultimate was Catherine. Soon enough, she seemed to drift from her coffee shop—and appeared at his table. She was stealth, magic, love with a capital L. She was love had, and lost—come, and gone. She was the one woman for whom he would give anything, but he could not have her. She was out of his reach. Then again, Catherine was genuine—her magic was not glitzy or flashy, but wholesome and satisfying. She was the one drug that fulfilled—the meaning of life, the reason for morning, the promise of next day as night fell.
He and Catherine sometimes bumped into each other when he was alone and traveling. The waiter did not approach her, and she seemed not to need anything. She was unchangingly beautiful. A far more beautiful and elegant version of Claire Lightfield, in fact, Jack often thought. Maybe that was the basis of his deep affection for regal Claire, who was tall and blonde and could be any man's dream, and she was for lucky Tony.
Claire—for all of her pale freckles and gray eyes, and her matronly hairdo around a cute, narrow face with slightly knobby nose, small mouth, and high forehead where she crammed all those Ph.D. lectures and dissertations—was a workmanlike copy of Catherine. Jack suspected Claire was decent to him because she was that to everyone—except that she tried to sister him, if that was the word, and openly admitted her affection for him. It wasn't love or sex, which went to Tony. Tony one, Jack zero. Which was all well and good. Jack had had his chance in life, and Catherine would not let him forget it.
Catherine sat across from Jack, in the shadows, poised and comfortable. There was some borderline unease or pregnancy about her, the way a dark frame surrounds the merriest painting. She had grayish Athena eyes like Claire, but richer, more golden hair than Claire. She had the perennial tan of a rich girl amid this Northeastern autumnal gloom and splendor, but she wasn't spoiled or vapid or selfish. She was the most considerate woman he had ever known.
Jack and Catherine sat like that for a while—not a time, because time does not exist in airports. Time in airports is relativistic. It is Einsteinian, concerned with moving targets (gravitational masses, gravid histories) and their intersections along the sliding scales of relative times and spaces. Jack and Catherine sat somewhere between absolute zero and the speed of light. Each kept hands folded on the table, each waiting for the other to speak, though they didn't need words to communicate in that timeless while.
"I promise to take better care of you," Jack said. "And the girls send their love."
That all pleased her. Catherine smiled mysteriously, and brushed his leg under the table. She always had that Chanel No. 19 fragrance about her, lighter than light, and the feel of her knee was soft as ever.
Her touch was light as the air itself, like a breeze scared up among people's knees as a street door opened, in the sorrows of winter, and slipped shut. He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply of her nearness, and felt his chin quaver. A tear ran down one cheek.
Soon, on the public address system, a woman's voice announced that the flight to Phoenix and San Diego was ready for boarding.
Jack did not like goodbyes at moments like this. With a last sip each of whiskey and beer, he wiped his mouth with a napkin. He felt a bit light-headed—should have remembered to eat something before boarding. He had not eaten since breakfast with Minica. That was now hours ago, here in the no-time or between-time of airport hurrying, checking screens, and twiddling your thumbs for hours.
Jack picked up his leather suitcase—Nemirovsky of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan—and headed toward that daylight, as filtered by distant picture windows. If it were a painting, it would be called Still Life in Rain and Fog, with Tail Fins.
His travels would take him across the friendly skies to Phoenix for a one hour layover, where he would relish sight of the city and its outlying deserts as a refreshing change from the darker, greener forests of the Northeast.
Land out there, in the Southwest, had eons ago been ocean bottom of some shallow, littoral sea, in which monstrous lizards and saurians basked and hunted among islands that were now mountains.
In Los Angeles, Jack would undergo the usual transformations designed to throw off any possible tailers or shooters out to ruin his day—or worse yet, to invade the sanctity of his private family life on the D Ranch near Temecula, on the borderland between San Diego and Riverside Counties. It was time to stop working and playing. It was time to go home for a rest.
He would probably never again see this particular lounge in his travels, but he would see Catherine Dorsey again. They had this habit of connecting, of bumping into each other unexpectedly in distant places.
He cast one last glance back, but she had gone.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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