The air mattress still lay on the floor, blankets in disarray on the couch from where Jeremy had slept the night before, and the furniture was exactly where it was supposed to be, but something felt wrong. She looked out the sliding glass door, to where soaked bougainvillea leaves were plastered on the new planking of the deck, and farther, to the darkening hills across the canyon, but couldn’t quite place where this feeling had come from.
She turned slowly in a circle, examining the room more closely. All at once, she was terribly frightened.
The painting was gone.
Jeremy
THE PLANE LURCHED SLIGHTLY AS IT PULLED BACK FROM THE Jetway, and then the dark form of LAX began to glide slowly away. It was drizzling, and the orange hazard lights of the airplane, reflecting off the pools of rain on the runway, looked like watery beacons illuminating the way out. Jeremy could see nothing beyond the airport, just a veil of mist, shrouding the rest of Los Angeles in an inky fog. It was almost as if the city no longer existed, as if he were being propelled forward from a vast nothing into some kind of wonderful dream.
Jeremy sat back in his seat, put his feet up on the footrest, and lifted his champagne flute.
Jeremy had never been the kind of person who longed for a life in the first-class section. Instead, he’d marched gamely through the aisle of the airplane toward the economy seats in the back, feeling like a man of the people. The big leather seats up front were for those overstuffed titans of industry in their wool worsted business suits, reading the Wall Street Journal and washing down their complimentary cocktail with a Maalox chaser. He couldn’t see how anyone thought that a miniature bottle of scotch, a foot or two of extra legroom, and Toy Story 2 on demand could possibly be worth the extra thousand bucks you’d drop on the ticket. Not when the same money could pay for a new Ricken-backer, or a month of his band’s studio rental, or three hundred bean-and-cheese burritos. Jeremy didn’t mind it in the back, with its more egalitarian outlook on humanity; he belonged in the portion of the plane where the reasonable people—the people with the right priorities—sat.
Or maybe this is just how he’d wanted to imagine himself. Maybe his whole image of himself as a complacently impoverished artist, a populist and proud of it, was just a form of self-justification, a way of deflecting any shame over being thirty-four years old and still making less than your average new college graduate. Because now that he was here—nestled in the cushiony leather seats of first class, sipping on a little flute of pretty good champagne, with his feet swaddled in a pair of cozy complimentary slippers—any argument in favor of sitting back in cattle class seemed ridiculous. He’d misjudged, radically, how wonderful first class (or, rather, L’Espace Première) really was. Up here the food actually smelled edible. The foie gras and lobster entrée were designed (according to the menu he’d been given) by a famous French chef whose Michelin three-star restaurant had a two-year waiting list. There were 112 channels of entertainment available on his own personal monitor. To be watched using his seat’s Bose noise-reduction headsets ($400 a pair—he’d priced them out once before settling for a cheaper brand). He had to fully extend his arm in order to get his hand anywhere remotely near his seatmate, and when he wanted to nap the stewardess would turn his fully reclining seat into a real bed with a feather duvet. Of course I wanted all this, he thought. I just didn’t admit it to myself.
“Meester Munger,” a voice cooed in his ear, and he looked up, smiling involuntarily. A soignée blond flight attendant (did they keep the prettiest ones up front, too?) was leaning over him, offering a tray of Grand Marnier truffles. Her neckline was just low enough to reveal a crack of freckled décolletage, artfully framed by a silk scarf printed with the airline logo. She smelled faintly of jasmine perfume; her lashes, perilously close to his face, were heavily laden with black mascara. “Would you like to schedule a massage with our in-flight masseuse?” she murmured in accented English.
“Why, yes,” he said, knocking back the last of the champagne and proffering the empty glass for a refill. “Yes, I would.”
The runway was backed up due to the storm. The airplane idled in an endless queue