Turbulence

Conrad's airplane had three bedrooms, and by Shannon they had ruined two of them.

The main cabin looked looted. Her stockings were in the galley, her brassiere was keeping a lampshade company, his tie hung over a reading lamp, two champagne glasses skated gently back and forth on a silver tray with the airplane's long breathing, and there was lipstick on a quantity of linen that had done nothing to deserve it. The marina papers Conrad was supposed to be reading had slid off the divan somewhere over the Loire and stayed there, face down, like a man avoiding a creditor. The hi-fi built into the bulkhead was playing something with vibraphones, low, the same stack of records it had been working through since France, and nobody had complained.

The airplane had been an airliner once, in a former life, hauling the public around in forty seats. Conrad had bought it like he bought everything, used and underpriced, and then gutted it to the ribs: staterooms where the seats used to be, a bar where the rest of the seats used to be, a galley with real ice and a girl to mind it, and four engines out there droning away like paid men. Belfie had spent the first hour treating it as she treated all of Conrad's holdings, which was as a hotel that owed her service. She'd rung the galley twice for ice she didn't need, once to watch it arrive and once to be sure the first time wasn't luck, and the stewardess had brought it both times with the same trained smile, a trim girl in a trim uniform who poured champagne at a tilt and had perfected the art of seeing nothing on this airplane that wasn't a glass in need of filling.

After that, Belfie had decided the flight was a campaign. The master stateroom fell first, all bird's-eye maple and a bed wider than her first apartment. The second went down before Shannon, a striped little room done up like a commodore's daydream. Two staterooms down.

She intended to sweep.

They were on their way to the third, her in his shirt and nothing else, him in nothing and unbothered, a glass riding loose in his hand, when the cabin speaker cleared its throat.

"Ah — Mr. Ogeby." The cockpit voice was calm as a dance instructor. "We've got some weather building ahead of us. It's going to get lively in about ten minutes. I'll ask you both to take a seat and belt in, please."

Conrad kept walking.

Belfie laughed and caught his arm and kissed him, deep, her hands in the silver hair, and he kissed her back with the glass still in his hand, navigating by memory, and she reached past him to the hi-fi console and turned the music up until the weather was somebody else's rumor.

The third stateroom was the small one at the tail, done in gray flannel and brass, the bed turned down by somebody paid never to wonder. Belfie pushed him onto it. He went down agreeably, a man falling onto his own property, and she climbed over him and took him in hand and sank down onto his cock, and the airplane, right on schedule, began to move underneath them.

It came up through the airframe in long shrugs, the floor lifting and settling, lifting and settling, and Belfie rode him and rode that too, all of it one motion, the storm doing half her work for her. She braced one hand flat on the bulkhead and let the Atlantic set the tempo. Conrad's hands closed on her hips. He had stopped being seventy-four somewhere over France and was now no age at all, just appetite with its eyes open, staring up at her like she was weather herself.

"So tight," he whispered, and his voice shivered on it like the airframe.

She was not quiet. There was nobody to hear her for a thousand miles but the Atlantic, and she gave it a performance.

Two knocks, and the door opened anyway.

The stewardess stood in the frame, trim in her uniform, one hand braced, her eyes pitched politely at the middle distance, at some fascinating point on the far wall where nobody was naked. The airplane dropped and caught itself. She didn't.

"Mr. Ogeby, I'm so sorry — everyone has to be belted in now, it's very important for your safety that—"

"Give us a moment," Belfie said, hostess to the last, without breaking stride.

Conrad, from the bottom of the world, managed a wave. It could have meant dismissal, benediction, carry on. The stewardess took it for all three, the door clicked, and they were alone again with the storm. Doors on this airplane were trained like everyone else.

Belfie spared the girl half a second of professional respect. Staying calm on someone else's money was harder work than it looked; she knew the trade. Then the floor dropped a foot and she stopped sparing anything at all.

After that it was the two of them and the weather, all the same animal. The airplane bucked and she rode the buck, hair down, knees burning on grand flannel, his hands hard on her hips, the engines roaring along under her own voice, and Conrad came up off the bed to meet her like the storm had personally challenged him, and he finished inside her with her name in pieces in his mouth.

She came down onto his chest. They lay tangled in the long shrugging motion of it, slick and breathless, her ear over his heart, which was going like the engines, steady and extravagant and burning somebody's money.

"You," Conrad said, when he had the air for it, "are going to be the death—"

The storm stopped sending postcards and arrived.

The airplane dropped out from under them as floors drop in dreams. The bed and Belfie parted company; she and Conrad went over the side together in a knot of sheets and landed on the carpet, his arm clamped around her before either of them knew which way the floor had gone, and somewhere forward the needle went skating across the record with a sound like fabric tearing, and the music quit, and it was just the engines and the weather and the two of them, naked on the floor of a rich man's airplane in a storm over the Atlantic.

The plane shook like a dog coming out of water. Glassware made decisions in the galley. The whole gutted airliner groaned down its long ribs, climbing and dropping, climbing and dropping, the worst amusement ride in the hemisphere, and Conrad held her flat to the floor with his arm and his leg like cargo he wasn't losing.

Belfie waited for her heart to do the frightened thing. It declined. It was having too good a time.

They laughed. There was no sense to it and it didn't matter; they laughed the whole ride down the storm's staircase, every drop bouncing the laugh out of them in pieces, his chest jumping under her cheek, her nails dug into the carpet, the two of them howling on the floor like fools while the weather did everything to that airplane except open it, and quit, finally, the air going long and smooth and apologetic, the engines settling back into their drone.

For a while neither of them moved. The cabin ticked and creaked and righted itself.

"I should have you both arrested," Conrad said to the ceiling, hoarse. "You and the sky."

The speaker cleared its throat again, unruffled, the voice of a man whose coffee had not spilled. "Ah — folks, that's the worst of it behind us. We'll be starting our descent into New York shortly. Have you on the ground in about forty minutes."

Belfie lay on her back on the carpet of the third stateroom, sweat-cooled and ruined and twenty-three thousand feet over America, and started laughing all over again, alone this time, at nothing. At everything. Conrad watched her do it with his head propped on his fist, delighted, proprietary, a man at his own private picture show.

"Conquered," she said, to the ceiling, meaning the stateroom. "That's all three."

"You'll want the cockpit next."

"I'm saving the cockpit."

They dressed the slow way, handing each other things, his shirt surrendered back over her head, and while Conrad ransacked the stateroom for his cufflinks she crawled up the bed and put her forehead against the cold little window.

The clouds gave the city up in pieces. The water first, gray as nickels, stitched with the wakes of boats. Then the bridges. Then the skyline itself, standing up out of the haze with its shoulders back, gray and glittering, a drawerful of jewelry stood on end, and the new Pan Am Building squatting over Park Avenue, which Conrad hated on sight every time, because somebody else had built it.

The city wasn't hers like it was his. He owned pieces of it like other men owned shoes. But it had the thing she wanted in it, somewhere down there in all that glitter and soot: the agents, the casting offices, the marquees with their bulbs burning in the daytime, the little lit window where they kept the names. Hers was down there. It just hadn't been called yet.

Conrad came up behind her smelling of the whole flight, champagne and cigarettes and spent weather, and moved her hair and kissed her shoulder, once, where it met her neck.

"Welcome home, baby," he said, and he said it like a landlord.

Then the seat-belt chime went on, ding, mild as a maître d', and they went forward and belted into the divan for the landing like obedient children, side by side, her head on his shoulder, the city tilting up the window as the airplane came around the long bend of its descent. Her ears filled and squeaked and let go. The stewardess, strapped into her jumpseat by the galley with her hands folded, gave them a nod of impeccable blindness, the whole flight already filed somewhere it would never be spoken of.

Belfie watched his city come up at her through the little oval window, and made it a promise, the kind she was always making and always meant: it was going to discover her yet.