TheBanyanTree: While Waiting at the Airport

[Monique Colver]

            Red frizzy hair, overly done, spiking up into the air like a
fountain. An impressive display of old(er) age attempting to be younger. She
wore jeans, tight and molded, and a matching denim jacket, and open toed
sandals with a 2 inch heel, because everyone knows it elongates the legs and
does wonders for one's posture. Black eyeliner, dark and thick, emphasized
the paleness of her skin, and bright red lipstick completed the look. It was
not necessarily the best look for her, but who would know any different? Who
would, for that matter, tell her so? She traveled alone, her matching
leopard print bags an indicator of something, we can't guess what because
what do we know? 

            She'd recently left her last boyfriend, the last one for now,
until the next, because there was always a next one, and she knew that she
would yet find the one who would last. How did she know this? Was it
instinctive? A knowledge born of experience? Of what, exactly, could she
attribute this? She couldn't say, but she knew. All the others had been mere
blips, temporary accidents easily fixed, additions to a life experience full
of such things. Cowboys had once been her favorite, until she realized that
cowboys liked to stay out where good restaurants were hard to find, at least
real cowboys, and the unreal cowboys, the ones who flocked to the cities,
weren't real, were they? Imposters, with their cowboy boots and their ten
gallon hats meant to show they were cowboys, when the truth was they
couldn't differentiate between a Mustang and a Pinto, but assumed they were
both Fords. 

            Her last boyfriend though, he had been different altogether. No
cowboy he, but a self-professed self-made man of unlimited means (he
claimed), who liked what he termed the good things in life. Fast cars, good
food, and fine wine, and he wore on his right pinky finger a large and
garish ring with a diamond in it. She had actually, when she had first
sighted the thing, shuddered to herself, but soon recovered from that when
he told her the oil wells he had part ownership of, and his private plane,
and the offshore accounts that made him feel secure because he knew the U.S.
Government would never find his money there. She believed all this because
it sounded good, he sounded like the man of her dreams, at least the man of
last week's dreams, though that could change at any minute. She tried to
overlook his excessive age, a good ten years older than she, and she was no
spring chicken, she should have grandchildren by now, she should have
grandchildren ready to have children, but he was older, and balding, with
his remaining fringe swept over the top of his head as if no one would
notice (and she'd swear to herself she didn't, not after he told her about
his house in the south of France), and he possessed a paunch. Not just a
paunch either, but a round and thrust forward object that gave him the
appearance of being pregnant, if a 70 year old man can have the appearance
of being pregnant, and he told her it was a good thing, this paunch, that it
meant he had money, because everyone knows that the sign of good living is a
good stomach. Everyone knows that, don't they?

            She knew, when she met him, that it would be a challenge,
because she would have to not only retrain him so he would comply with her
idea of the future, but she would also have to put up with his odd
mannerisms, such as flirting with every woman he came across, whether she
was 16 or 86 (though there he seemed to draw the line), and picking at his
teeth in public, which reminded her far too much of her own overbearing
father, who had also had a paunch and a receding hairline, but no diamond
pinky ring. 

            She did not know that he would refuse to comply with her idea of
the future. She thought an older man like that would be glad of the
attention, and would welcome having someone like her around, someone who,
even now (she told herself) would attract attention wherever she went.
(Which was true, in its own way, especially when she wore her tight white
Capri pants with the white see-through shirt, but it wasn't necessarily good
attention.) She thought he would welcome someone to see him through his old
age, but instead she found him recalcitrant, not willing to commit to more
than a weekend, his standard line being, "Don't know if I'm ready to settle
down yet, there's still a lot of women haven't had a chance yet!" 

            Then she discovered he wasn't rich, but was living off social
security and the money his son sent him every month, guilt money the old man
demanded and guilt money the son paid because it was easier than having the
old man move in with him, and in the end, when he asked her for money to pay
for a vacation they wanted to take together, and she said, "What about your
money?" (She had assumed he'd be paying for the vacation, for she had no
money, she had relatively little of anything to speak of, and especially
money, so when he'd asked her, after a few drinks, if she could "Perhaps pay
for this trip for us both, and I'll pay for the next one," as if this was a
reciprocal arrangement, and when she asked why he couldn't pay for it, he'd
said, "I'm a little short right now. A few investments went south."

            He had no investments of course, he had nothing but his small
apartment and his allowance from his son, and once she figured that out, she
left. It's not as if she was all that fond of him as a person, so it wasn't
hard for her. It was the idea of him that she'd liked most of all, and when
that idea turned out to be wrong, she did not hesitate to tell him to move
on to the next sucker, and his face, when she did so, turned such a bright
red she was afraid, almost, that he'd stroke out and die on her, which
normally she wouldn't have minded, but since they hadn't been married and he
hadn't anything to leave her, it would only be a nuisance and an
inconvenience. There would probably be questions to answer. 

            She saved her money after that, for a month or so, and then
booked a flight to Las Vegas. It was time, she thought, to have some fun,
and everyone knows (don't they?) that the high rollers in Vegas are
everywhere, and there she had a good chance of meeting someone worthwhile,
someone who would recognize her value, someone she could charm into giving
her what she wanted, which was mostly respectability and a life free of
worry, now that she had trouble getting work. Not much call for an aging
court reporter who couldn't keep up. She had never thought she'd need to
worry about retirement, since she knew that someone, some man, would turn
up, but she'd been carrying that idea around since her early twenties, and
so far it'd been forty years, and no such luck.

            It was all luck, she said to herself, late at night. For that
matter, she also said that to herself early in the morning and midafternoon,
especially if she were inclined to have a drink. It was all fate and luck
and no measure of planning or worthiness or wanting. It was the luck of the
draw.

            She sat in the airport with her matching leopard skin bags and
her chemically enhanced hair, and she thought to herself that if she'd only
had the money to make other improvements, perhaps a bust increase, a
facelift, a tummy tuck, a butt implant (her butt being, to her, a
disappointment in its flatness), then perhaps she'd be farther along in this
quest. As it were, she had only what she had, and she was just going to have
to work harder, while appearing not to care whether she met a man or not.
This is a tricky task, the searching out of something that one must appear
not to want, and if done incorrectly it can backfire and leave one with
nothing. 

            She already had nothing, so she had nothing to lose, and when
you have nothing to lose, you can be as ridiculous as necessary because you
can't possibly get any farther from your goal, can you? So you would think,
though over time this has been proven to be an incorrect assumption.
Scientifically proven, in a laboratory, with the proper controls, it has
been proven that just when one thinks they have nowhere to go but up, they
can just as easily slide down farther. And then they think, "I can certainly
go no farther down than this, anything would be an improvement," and that is
when the next rapid slide down the slope happens. 

            The flight to Vegas was delayed, but she wasn't worried. She
knew it would come, and she would board, and she would fly to Vegas, and she
would be sociable and she would latch onto some man who was looking for her
exactly, or someone enough like her that he wouldn't be able to tell the
difference, and at last she'd be able to live the fairy tale. She knew it,
and so she waited for her flight with the same amount of certainty she
always managed to muster in these situations, the same certainty that had
gotten her this far, and she smiled to herself, and to everyone who passed
by, because she was going to be just fine, thank you very much for asking.