Snow began to fall heavily outside the airplane terminal, but I tried not to look at it. I felt nervous enough about the flight back home, and the idea of flying through a snowstorm was even less appealing. My eyes traveled around the room, surveying the faces of my fellow passengers. I noticed several quick glances at the windows of gate 7, usually followed by grimaces and worried looks. At least I wasn't the only one. My hands were beginning to shake. I've had this fear of flying ever since watching a marathon of airplane disaster films on television when I was a kid.
I would have sworn they would never allow us to board the plane, but at around 7:30 pm we were instructed to begin the boarding procedure. I had almost hoped the flight would be delayed until the snow passed. Maybe they were more used to this weather out here on the east coast. It wasn't just the idea of flying in a snowstorm that bothered me. The thought of arriving home to my wife after four days of freedom also tied my stomach into knots.
It shouldn't be that way, I thought as I grabbed my duffel bag and rose to my feet. It wasn't always like this. But to remember a time when things were good between us, I'd have to go back at least seven or eight years.
To be honest, the four days I spent at my parents' home in Connecticut were some of the best I could remember in quite some time. It was my brother Tom's idea that the siblings and our parents spend Christmas together, so I convinced my wife Janet to allow me to be absent that year. It didn't take a lot of convincing. I could tell she didn't really want me around anyway. Tom, my sister Marianne, and I all converged on my parents' home and had a wonderful few days together. I felt like a kid again. We stayed up nights laughing and playing board games. We went to the Christmas Eve service at my parents' church and sang while holding candles. We talked about our families and caught up with major and minor events in each others' lives.
I never told them about my marriage problems, though. I was embarrassed. I was sure that I was stuck in my situation, because I knew I could never leave Janet on her own unless I knew for sure she could take care of herself. I felt trapped all the time, whether I was at home eating another silent dinner in front of the television or if I was sitting in my cramped cubicle at the office. I didn't tell them that I had tried to overdose on sleeping pills three years earlier, but became scared and forced myself to vomit them into the sink. Even Janet didn't know about that one. Nobody did but me. I don't know if my family wondered why I avoided talking about Janet, or about her promotion to regional manager the previous spring. If they did, they never said anything. The one awkward moment came when Tom asked why I talked so much about my co-worker, Cindy. I didn't realize I was doing it, and I evaded the question to the best of my ability. I couldn't tell him that I had fallen for Cindy, and that I longed for her every single day. Even when I lay alone on the pull-out sofa in the den during a particularly rough patch with my wife, my thoughts were with Cindy.
But here, boarding the plane back to my miserable existence in Oregon, I was thousands of miles from her. I was also thousands of miles from Janet. The two seemed to balance each other out.
*****
I took my seat on the aisle and stared at the floor as people continued to enter the passenger section of the plane. I hoped I wouldn't end up with another chatterbox in the seat next to me. The trip out here was made worse by this obviously lonely guy who talked my ear off the entire cross-country flight. He talked about his kids and about his failed marriage that resulted in him flying across the country to see the kids again. He talked about how his ex-wife hen-pecked him every time they met. He was about as miserable as I was, I would guess. The difference between us was that I don't talk at length about my problems. Well, not unless I feel relaxed and comfortable enough to talk about them. That usually requires getting a few drinks in me first.
When we parted at the airport, the guy said that we should keep in touch so that he could update me about how the holidays went with his kids. Honestly I think he felt I did a better job listening than I actually did. Out of the hours of one-sided conversation, I could only remember a few key points. Number one: don't marry the wrong woman. Too late for that, guy. Number two: if you do marry the wrong woman, don't have kids with her. I doubted that this would be a problem. After a few years of rejection from Janet when I was in the mood for sex, I simply stopped trying. It had been at least two years since I had been inside her. Sometimes, even in these days when I could barely look at her, I remembered how things used to be and a little portion of my feelings for her were rekindled. But I knew she'd only push me away and turn over, so I'd get up, shut the bathroom door behind me, and think of the old days, of the old Janet, while I masturbated.
My favorite memory, and the one that would get the quickest results, was of a night we had together maybe six months after we were married. We walked through the neighborhood, hand in hand, admiring the Christmas lights on the neighbors' houses. We used to take a lot of these walks together. Her eyes were gleaming in the moonlight. We laughed, we hugged, we kissed. We loved each other. We had our whole lives ahead of us. We were still young, and we felt like things would never change. Fuck, what had happened? Was it my fault? Did I do this to her?
When we got home, our hands were pink with the cold. Our faces were ice. We removed our clothes and embraced under a warm blanket. Her nipples were hard with the cold and with arousal. I stroked her thighs, and my fingers traveled closer and closer to her soft mound of pubic hair. When I reached it, she giggled slightly.
"Your fingers are still cold," she said, and kissed me.
"It's warm down here," I said, and rubbed her moist slit. She was so wet. God, so wet. "You've been expecting me?"
"I started getting wet before we reached Maple Street. You could have had me anywhere on the walk," she said. I smiled at her and lowered my head. I penetrated her with my tongue. She gasped, and grabbed my hair. She pushed me even closer to her. I devoured her delicious, wet vagina until she reached orgasm, and there was wetness all over my face. We laughed. We used to laugh a lot back then.
We made love that night, twice. That was the only time since our honeymoon that we had done it twice in one night. I couldn't hold it long the first time that December evening, because she was so wet and so warm that the pleasure was overwhelming. I came inside her after only a few minutes. I felt a little embarrassed. She laughed and kissed me. God, she loved me then. We lay together for a long time, watching the wood become consumed in the fireplace. We slept briefly. Then we woke, kissed deeply, and made love again. Those were happy days for me. I remember going to sleep with a smile on my face and the slight taste of her on my tongue, the intoxicating scent of her in my nose.
The irony was not lost on me as I sat in the cold bathroom, stroking my cock, ejaculating into a wad of toilet paper. Janet slept in the next room, not knowing or caring that this was a nightly ritual for me. In my fantasy, I rarely ever got past the part where I fingered her before I would cum, hunched over like some sad, lonely creature. I wonder what she would think if she knew I mostly thought about her in these moments. Even Cindy, whose face filled so many of my waking thoughts, was rarely ever a part of those fantasies. I knew there was no chance, so I suppose I didn't allow myself that indulgence.
I'm certain that, ultimately, I was the one at fault. I hadn't been perfect. As much as I tried, I could not trace my problems, the things that made me become distant at times, to their source. I suppose if we were still open and honest with each other, we could have worked things out. But she was in her own bubble most the time, and I had learned to build one of my own. Hers, I think, started when her career really got moving. Perhaps she was embarrassed at her company parties when she introduced me and the person would ask me what I do. Customer service, in a tiny cubicle? Married to a woman who makes five times my pay and has hundreds of people under her? Jesus, could anyone blame her for feeling like she married a failure with no ambition?
*****
All of this was on my mind when I waited for the plane to fill up, which is probably why I looked so sad when Meredith boarded the plane and entered my life. I noticed her when she was halfway between the door and my seat. She had a young face, beautiful in a way that some people might not notice at first. Her dark, reddish hair fell in long corkscrews in her face and on her shoulders. She brushed it aside, smiling nervously as she tried to find her seat. She was wearing a black sweater, and it snuggled tightly against her fairly large chest and over the slight rise of her stomach. I guessed that she might be considered a little overweight, but I felt it lent her a classic style of beauty.
She seemed to notice the expression on my face (which hadn't changed despite my admiring her face and curvy figure), because a slight look of sympathy appeared in her bright brown eyes, and the smile briefly disappeared. She gave me a look that said: whatever you're going through, I feel for you. After a moment, she seemed to remember that she was holding people up behind her and resumed the search for her seat. She stopped just before my row and looked at her ticket.
"Looks like this is my seat," she said with a friendly smile, and looked at the seat next to me. I smiled at her and rose to my feet to let her in. She thanked me and brushed by me. When our bodies touched, it felt electric. Her breasts slid across my chest, and I briefly imagined the friction against her nipples, rolling them to the side in slow motion.
She seemed to realize what had just happened, and looked away.
"Sorry about that. I thought I had more room than that," she said, and I thought I could hear the embarrassment in her voice. I smiled warmly at her, and when she finally met my eyes with hers, she smiled back.
"It's okay. There's not a lot of room on these planes," I said.
She turned to sit down, and I got a quick glance at her rear. God, it looked just as good as the rest of her. I shook the thought out of me. I felt that it was disrespectful to be admiring this stranger's body, this woman I didn't even know but who deserved more than my leering eyes. I blame it partially on how starved I was for a woman's attention. This had happened periodically throughout my entire marriage, but for the last several months it had been a constant cloud of despair over me. I felt like I fell for every woman I spoke to. I imagined affairs with neighbors, co-workers, the wives of my friends. It was a desire I felt ashamed of but couldn't control. I've often wondered how many others have felt this way as often as I have. I love sex; I love the intimacy, the holding, the touching. It seemed like an especially cruel kick in the teeth that so much of what I desired was witheld from me, always. I slept next to a woman almost every night, a woman with whom I shared vows, yet, as I lay there awake, wishing for the soft touch of a woman, the feeling of female skin against me, the warmth of her bosom pressed against my chest, it was as if I were lying there alone. I knew I couldn't touch my wife, my own wife. She would only pull away, and I'd feel even worse.
It was times like these that I felt like I should just drive into a tree on my way home from the airport. Who would notice? Who would care?
