“Are you allergic to dogs?” An attractive young woman was asking me this question on our recent flight from Los Angeles to New York. She was sitting on my left, next to the window. My wife and I had been unable to secure seats next to one another, so we both were occupying a middle seat, one on each side of the aisle. When I told the young woman that I’m not allergic to dogs, she said she was glad, because she didn’t want me to break out in hives. She pointed to the small carrying case at her feet, saying that it contained her small dog.
We quickly embarked on a lively conversation. She’s a lawyer who works for a big multinational firm that merged a few years ago with the smaller company for which she had worked. Seventy per cent of the lawyers from her former firm lost their jobs, so she must be good at her what she does. She likes the work but not the fact that she’s employed by a soulless corporation. She’d work for a non-profit if it would pay her bills. She feels she's not doing anyone any good.
After a few minutes, it became clear that she was drunk, even though her diction was as crisp as that of a sober person. She told me that she was 32 and still single. She asked me how she could find love. I told her that it was a matter of luck and being open. “Being open,” she repeated, as though my answer was profound. She asked me if I’m married, my lost wedding ring having given her no clue to my status. When I told her that my wife was sitting on the other side of the aisle, my companion said she would ask the young man on my right, in the aisle seat, to change places with my wife. The young man was at least six and a half feet tall. It was all I could do to persuade her that it would not be fair to ask him to make the exchange.
“Are you in love?” she then asked me, perhaps figuring that I might not be in love if I wasn’t willing to ask the huge man on my right to squeeze into a middle seat so that my wife and I could sit together. She was surprised when I told her that I was not in love with my wife. “I love my wife,” I said, “but being in love and loving are different.” When you’re in love, I explained, you’re thinking mainly of yourself. When you love, you think mainly of the other person.
“Well,” she then asked me, patting my arm, “if a beautiful woman offered herself to you, would you sleep with her, if your wife would never know?” I thought of “City Slickers,” the 1991 film in which the character played by Billy Crystal is asked a similar question about sleeping with a woman from Venus, who would arrive in a space ship and then leave in an hour. He said no, he wouldn’t sleep with her because although nobody would know, he would know.
The absurdity of the situation didn’t escape me. My companion was treating me like a man a third my age. It would have been flattering had she not been drunk. She acted like a person with dementia, asking me where I lived, what I was doing in Los Angeles, and so forth, over and over again. When I told her I had lived in Israel, she asked if I knew her Jewish psychiatrist, whose name she gave me “No,” I said, “there are a lot of Jews in New York, too many to know them all.” She soon fell asleep, her right knee upraised, making it impossible for me to lower my seat-back tray without disturbing her. When she awoke near the end of the flight, she acted as if she had never said a word to me. And I thanked whatever gods might be that I was no longer young, single and lost.
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