When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,73

incessantly, hoping to get bumped up.

There are only two classes on the airline I normally take between France and the United States — coach and something called Business Elite. The first time I sat there, I was flown to America and back for a book tour. “Really,” I kept insisting, “there’s no need.” The whole “first-to-board” business, I found a little embarrassing, but then they brought me a bowl of warm nuts and I began to soften. The pampering takes some getting used to. A flight attendant addresses me as “Mr. Sedaris,” and I feel sorry that she’s forced to memorize my name rather than, say, her granddaughter’s cell phone number. On this particular airline, though, they do it in such a way that it seems perfectly natural, or at least it does after a time.

“May I bring you a drink to go with those warm nuts, Mr. Sedaris?” the woman looking after me asked — this as the people in coach were still boarding. The looks they gave me as they passed were the looks I give when the door of a limousine opens. You always expect to see a movie star, or, at the very least, someone better dressed than you, but time and time again it’s just a sloppy nobody. Thus the look, which translates to, Fuck you, Sloppy Nobody, for making me turn my head.

On all my subsequent flights, the Business Elite section was a solid unit, but on this particular plane it was divided in two: four rows up front and two in the back. The flight attendant assured everyone in my section that although we were technically in the back, we shouldn’t think of it as the back. We had the same rights and privileges as those passengers ahead of us. Yet still they were ahead of us, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d been somehow favored.

On the way to New York, I sat beside a bearded Frenchman, who popped a pill shortly after takeoff and was out until we landed. On the leg back there was no one beside me, at least not for the first half hour. Then a flight attendant knelt in the aisle beside my seat and asked if I might do her a favor. That’s how they talk in Business Elite. “I’m wondering, Mr. Sedaris, if you might do me a favor?”

Chipmunk-like, my cheeks packed with warm nuts, I cocked my head.

“I’ve got a passenger a few rows up, and his crying is disturbing the people around him. Do you think it would be OK if he sat here?”

The woman was blond and heavily made-up. Glasses hung from a chain around her neck, and as she gestured to the empty window seat beside me, I got a pleasant whiff of what smelled like oatmeal cookies. “I believe he’s Polish,” she whispered. “That is to say, I think he’s from Poland. The country.”

“Is he a child?” I asked, and the flight attendant told me no.

“Is he drunk?”

Again she said no. “His mother just died, and he’s on his way to her funeral.”

“So people are upset because he’s crying over his dead mother?”

“That’s the situation,” she told me.

I’d once read that a first-class passenger complained — threatened to sue, if I remember correctly — because the blind person next to him was traveling with a Seeing Eye dog. He wasn’t allergic, this guy. Labrador retrievers on the street didn’t bother him, but he hadn’t paid thousands of dollars to sit next to one, or at least that was his argument. If that had seemed the last word in assholiness, this was a close second.

I said of course the man could sit beside me, and the flight attendant disappeared into the darkness, returning a few minutes later with the grieving passenger.

“Thank you,” she mouthed.

And I said, “No problem.”

The Polish man might have been in his midforties but seemed older, just as people in my parents’ generation had. Foreign blood, or an abundance of responsibility, had robbed him of the prolonged adolescence currently enjoyed by Americans of the same age, so his face, though unlined, seemed older than mine, more used. His eyes were red and swollen from crying, and his nose, which was large and many-faceted, looked as if it had been roughly carved from wood and not yet sanded smooth. In the dim light, he resembled one of those elaborate, handcrafted bottle stoppers — the kindly peasant or good-natured drunk who tips his hat when you pull the string.