Foreigners (11 page)

“Are you finished, sir?” The flight attendant stood in the aisle beside him, her hand on the back of his seat, leaning in so that her face was close to his. She had large dark eyes and brown hair cut in a bob, her skin pale, with just the faintest dusting of foundation. “No . . . I mean, yes.” Her closeness made Payne anxious, and he could feel his face begin to flush. “Yes, I'm finished, thank you.”

“A little more wine, maybe?” she asked, with a smile that revealed a neat row of straight white teeth. Her lips, Payne could see, were moist, as if she had just passed her tongue across them.

“No, thank you. I'm fine, really,” he said, and nodded, almost banging his forehead against her chin.

“Very good then,” she replied, and lifted the half-finished remnants of his dinner from the tray. Then she reached across and took away his neighbour's platter. Payne closed his eyes as the fabric of her blouse brushed his cheek.

He had noticed early on in the flight that the attendants were, to a one, quite attractive, and it had made him nervous. Payne had always been uncertain around pretty women. He couldn't help but watch them, how they moved, how they reacted to others. What it must be like to be a beautiful person in this world, he often wondered, when there are so many people who simply are not.

His uneasiness was heightened now by the knowledge that these women, in their loose white blouses, their snug navy skirts and vests, and silk neckerchiefs, were Dutch. He'd heard the stories about the Dutch, about their permissiveness. After all, it was this that had so excited him about Amsterdam. As the flight attendant moved on and leaned over to speak to another passenger, Payne stared at her buttocks and contemplated the wondrously indulgent feats she might be willing to perform.

He recalled reading somewhere that at Schiphol Airport there was a brothel lounge, completely legitimate, certified by the government. The idea was to pander to international businessmen who had to pass through, on their way from one stress-filled corporate engagement to another. Briefly Payne considered checking the duration of his layover between flights, but before he could even dig his itinerary from his jacket pocket, misgiving quashed any idea of an assignation.

He'd been right, Kathryn was angry.

“Do you know what it's like?” she said, standing in the doorway of his kitchen, one hand firmly planted on her hip, the other waving a smouldering cigarette accusingly in his direction. “Do you even have an inkling of how it felt to be singled out in the middle of a lecture hall by that man?”

Payne kept his head down and tried to concentrate on the potato dumplings boiling in the pot before him, while at the same time making certain his sauce didn't burn. He needed a few more drops of olive oil in the water to keep the gnocchi from sticking, but to have added it would've simply upset Kathryn further. She'd already accused him of not paying enough attention to her needs.

“I'm sorry,” he said, casting a furtive glance toward the doorway.

She let out an exasperated breath and brought the cigarette to her lips. Through a cloud of smoke she said, “You know, Harvey, you can't always be sorry.”

Then she turned and walked into the living room, and soon the thumping of the stereo, its volume tuned higher than he would have thought possible, reverberated through the house. Payne had never understood her taste in music: angry, violent, discordant. He'd tried several times to coax her toward his own musical preferences. But she'd turned up her nose at Schubert and Chopin, and when he'd parried with Leonard Cohen, she'd fallen asleep halfway through the first side of the album. In the end he had to admit that it was her disregard for his own notions that attracted him; he was drawn to her
wilfulness and occasional contempt. A failing on his part, possibly, but then again, failing was something Payne understood intimately.

The gnocchi, drenched in thick marinara sauce; the bruschetta with the crisply toasted Italian bread, fresh hothouse tomatoes and finely diced onions; the sweet gelato; the perfectly aged Chianti: all had the desired effect. Kathryn, sated, had relaxed considerably. Stretched out on the sofa, eyes closed, her head in Payne's lap, she breathed steadily, edging toward slumber. For his part, Payne had to suppress the urge to belch, not wanting to disturb the moment.

“I'd completely forgotten,” she said lazily, opening her eyes to him. “You wanted to tell me something, didn't you?” Then added, mockingly: “Something wonderful.”

Payne shifted so that Kathryn had to lift herself into a sitting position, then he put a hand on each of her shoulders. He looked her straight in the eye, and in a voice he hoped would sound both mature and enticing, said, “What is the first thing you think of when I say
Amsterdam
?”

“Anne Frank,” Kathryn replied, without missing a beat.

“Oh. Well . . .
Really
?” Payne said, rather at a loss. “Yes, I guess I could see how someone could come up with that. It's not quite what I had in mind.”

Payne cleared his throat.

“Let's try it again,” he said, and furrowed his brow, as if to imply that Kathryn should concentrate a little harder. “Now, without being so morbid, what's the first thing you think of when I say
Amsterdam
?”

She took a moment longer to answer him the second time: “Canals?”

Payne grimaced.

“Windmills?”

His head drooped.

“Wooden shoes? Rembrandt? Vermeer?” Kathryn pushed his hands away and huffed: “Oh, for God's sake, Harvey. How am I supposed to know what you want me to think?”

Sensing another shift in her mood, toward one that would hardly be conducive to his plans for the remainder of the evening, Payne placed a reassuring hand on her thigh.

“Look, sweetie, I apologize. I shouldn't play games like that.”

“I hate games.”

“Yes, I know. It's just that . . .” Payne slid a little closer to her. “It's just that I was so excited, I guess I wanted to build up the suspense a bit.”

“If you have something to tell me,” Kathryn said, straightening herself, “I wish you would just come out and say it.”

“Very well.” Payne could no longer hide his sly grin. “I've been invited to a symposium in Holland in January and I want you to come with me.”

There was a long silence, during which neither of them moved, and Payne could feel his grin begin to wane.

“You want to take me to Holland?” Kathryn said, after what had seemed an eternity. There was little in her tone or expression that gave Payne any reassurance.

“Yes,” he said meekly.

“Oh, Harvey!” She threw her arms around him and pulled him so close that for a moment he lost his breath. “Harvey, that's wonderful.”

She kissed his cheek and then his ear, taking the lobe between her teeth.

“I thought you might like that,” he said, his words now flush with confidence.

“Like it?” she said, her breath warm in his ear. “I think it's amazing.”

Then she pushed him roughly away, and Payne fell backward, banging his head on the armrest of the sofa.

“Amsterdam!” she blurted, and then in a low, growling voice, as she crawled toward him: “Oh, Harvey, you naughty little boy, you.”

Although he had never really been one for films, Payne had been looking forward to the in-flight movie. The television screens, suspended from the ceiling at ten-foot intervals, had advertised a romantic comedy. He had no doubt that it would be utterly vacuous and implausible, but still Payne had welcomed the thought of a diversion. Unfortunately, it was not to be. A malfunction in the airplane's audiovisual system saw to that. Not only was the film, as well as the news and sports programming, cancelled, but the personal headsets offered nothing beyond static. Payne switched back and forth among the twelve channels on his armrest console and found nothing but white noise.

Looking around, it seemed to him that he was the only one bothered by the situation. The little man beside him was curled neatly against the window, his complimentary blanket tucked under his chin, fast asleep. Payne wished he could sleep, wished he could close his eyes and let the rest of the flight slip by unnoticed. But there was little chance of that. He felt strangely wide awake, fidgety even. And to add insult
to injury, in place of the televised entertainment, a map of the airplane's progress was displayed on the screens.

The childlike image of a white aircraft was superimposed over a tract of bright blue labelled
Atlantische Oceaan
. From the tail of the little plane stretched a long red line reaching all the way back to Toronto. Below the crude map was a list of figures: air speed, altitude, elapsed time and time to destination. Looking at the screen, Payne was reminded of the old saying: a watched pot. And for a moment, he could have sworn that he saw the tiny white airplane move backward.

If only that were possible, Payne thought, and imagined flicking a switch on his console that would set everything in reverse, like the rewind button on the tape deck of his stereo. He didn't want to go too far back, just to the departure lounge and his phone call to Kathryn—or maybe two weeks earlier. Yes, two weeks earlier would be better. Then again, if he was honest with himself, a rearward leap of a month would be his best bet to set things straight. A month would allow him to nip the whole thing in the bud, sever the shoot before it even had the chance to bloom.

Just thinking about it was beginning to upset him, to give him an uneasy feeling in his stomach, as if the fruity Merlot were doing battle with the unsavoury stroganoff. So he turned his mind instead to the new lines he'd scribbled after he'd finished eating.

Payne had peppered this new draft of his address with empty appreciation of his Dutch colleagues, as well as mention of a tenuous kinship in the plight of their respective cultures in the face of overwhelming outside influence. It was, he knew, utterly transparent, and would be recognized as not
only slapdash but insincere. He no longer cared, however. Everything about this excursion now seemed delusive to him. The thin blankets and flat pillows handed out to the coach passengers as a pretense to comfort, the sinewy strips of beef in his inedible dinner, even the forced pearly smiles arbitrarily dispensed by the comely flight attendants struck Payne as dishonest. The symposium itself, as Gil Foden had so smugly pointed out to him the previous week, was also a sham: the dubious mandate of an equally questionable EU funding scheme.

But most deceitful of all, Payne decided, closing his notebook and putting it to one side, was the empty seat between himself and his slumbering neighbour.

The marijuana they'd smoked in preparation for their excursion to Amsterdam took Payne back to his own student days, but the tales he recounted for Kathryn, while they took the slightly acrid smoke into their lungs, were more fiction than fact. The actualities, which flooded back into his lightened head as the pot began to obstruct his senses, were those of frightened paranoia, unruly limb-twitching tics and the desperate need to belong. He remembered darkened parties in pungent, squalid basement apartments where the incessant permutations of progressive rock LPs replaced conversation and keggers with meaty-fisted frat boys jamming roaches in his face and calling him “faggot” if he declined. Payne mentioned none of this to Kathryn.