Munich Airport (2 page)

Trish says, answering my father, Of course we can get you a spot to lie down.

My father says, Maybe there's nothing of the sort.

Trish says, They must have something.

Why not try the airline's executive lounge? I say.

That's a great idea, says Trish. I'll go.

No, let me go, I say.

Trish thinks this is a bad idea. She is certain she is more likely to succeed. I am just an ordinary traveler, and she is from the Embassy of the United States of America. I know that she is right, and ought to be the one to go, but if she leaves, I will be stuck here, in this chair. My father will fall asleep and I will be alone to stare at the mess we've made on the table, the large plates of food we haven't eaten, the napkins we have blown our noses with, and too tired to distract myself with something constructive, such as reading or working.

Go together, says my father. I'm fine, I'll just sit here, shut my eyes, rather do that on my own.

Trish and I glance at my father to see if he is serious. His eyes are already closed. I say, Someone should stay with you.

I'm fine, just tired. If one of you stays I'll feel obliged to stay awake and keep you company.

He opens his eyes. He digs in his bag for his sound-canceling headphones and puts them around his neck. Then he says, I've run out of Tylenol. Do you have some? I've got a headache.

I'm out, I say, but I'll get some more. I push his glass of water toward him and tell him to have a drink. He takes a sip—perhaps to prove he's rational, that he really wants to be on his own—then closes his eyes again and says, If they say I can lie down in the lounge, one of you can come back and get me.

My father is dressed in a flannel blue plaid shirt with various shades of brown in it, and a white undershirt that is tight around his neck. The flannel shirt is tucked into a pair of blue jeans hiked up very high, and he's got on a very flash pair of fluorescent yellow running shoes. This is his travel gear. He likes to be comfortable when he travels—he also has the sound-canceling headphones and a neck pillow. In Berlin, however, and even during much of our trip to the Rhine, to the Ardennes, to Luxembourg, and to Brussels, he wore old suits, the suits he wore as a professor—suits that are now oversized on him. I don't know what my father looks like when, back at home, he's out and about. If I call him and he is not at home watching golf, he is usually down some megastore aisle of tools or groceries stacked thirty feet high on either side of him, looking for screws, or comparing prices of pasta, or considering a new weedeater that he will use once, maybe twice, then give to the gardener. Other than these places, I don't think he goes anywhere. I don't think he goes to the movies, I don't think he goes for walks, I don't think he drives to the coast—the Gulf—as he used to do, when we were young and he was home from teaching. So far as I know, he has no friends. We talk about once a month. When I catch him at home, we hang up the phone and go on our laptops, so we can see each other, and usually he's in a white sleeveless muscle shirt, though his arms are just his bones, and he's unshaven. About twenty minutes into any conversation, he says, I'm about to faint, gotta go. Sometimes, if it's hot, he doesn't wear a shirt at all. His skin is pretty loose, and you can see his ribs.

Trish and I stand at the same time. We leave my father alone at the table. He slumps in his chair. He seems instantly asleep. Just looking at him, I yawn. I hope this works, says Trish. Me too, I say. We go down the escalator, through the wide and weightless slow space of the terminal. I cannot think of anything to say. Trish and my father have spent a lot of time alone, but Trish and I have never been alone, or only so rarely and briefly that it doesn't really count. I decide not to say anything. This is a solemn occasion, after all, and speaking isn't necessary. Trish's phone beeps. Throughout our hour together in the food hall, her phone has beeped several times. It's her personal phone—she also has a clunky old Nokia for work. I know, from my father, that she and her husband are going through a difficult period. I don't know Trish well enough to ask about it, or even to offer sympathy. But my father told me it seems destined to end, and it would not surprise me if it has just ended. She reads her phone. When she's done, she looks up at me and I realize I'm staring at her. She gives me a funny smile. Sorry, I say, I was just lost in thought there.

How long will you stay at home? she asks.

For me, by now, home is London, I say.

Of course, she says—when will you go back?

Soon, I say. I can't afford to stay away much longer. I'm supposed to be starting something new.

Surely they'll wait, under the circumstances.

Maybe, but not too much longer.

What do you do?

I'm a marketing consultant.

I know, I was just wondering what you did as a marketing consultant.

I devise marketing strategies for clients.

She gives me a look that says, I know that, I meant
what kind of strategies do you devise
. But instead of pressing any further, she says, Your dad says you're quite successful.

Does he?

She nods.

I say nothing. It doesn't sound like something my father would say. For a moment I'm not sure I ought to believe her—maybe she's trying to mend a rift she's perceived between my father and me, a rift for which she may feel some responsibility. But she isn't responsible. And I am not really successful—by which I mean not as successful as I once believed I should be. I did International Business in college—at Princeton, which was where my father went—and I did all right. I decided not to do an MBA. I wanted to work. I didn't want to waste any time. But I also wanted to travel. I passed up some good job offers in the States. An internship in London came up—unpaid—and I took it. I never planned to stay a long time in London, but over the years I became increasingly convinced that I could not return home, that I could not leave London and somehow find contentment in a place like Tampa or Dallas. I'd grown accustomed to, and much preferred, the way people lived on top of one another in London. And I suppose I very much liked the fact that I was a boy from a place where we all drove big trucks on big roads and where space and solitude were easily attainable, and now I was living in a place where nobody I knew had a car and where space and solitude were not features of the landscape but conditions one had to manufacture in the mind. There was, yes, always New York, but I had been to New York several times while at college. There was something in the distance of London, something about a body of water between me and where I came from, and something in particular about being a foreigner. I have a nice, if very small, flat in Spitalfields, which I sublet from an architect. I run my own one-man consultancy now, and I keep busy. I've just left a client I'd been with for many years—a supermarket chain. It was a nice situation. I worked three days a week at the client's main London office. I had a badge. The other two days of the week, I worked for other clients. Just before the news of Miriam's death, however, I left the supermarket chain. I found something new—not necessarily better, but different.

We're here, I say.

The door to the lounge is translucent. There isn't a handle. Trish puts her palm flatly on the glass and pushes. The door opens and we are met, unexpectedly, by another corridor, which is narrow, and which leads to another door, also of translucent glass. It is like an airlock, in which the wealthy or well traveled can spend a moment decontaminating their thoughts, preparing themselves to switch from chaos to luxury. Behind that door, the coffee-brown lounge is making noise. It seems like such a faraway place, something like—at least from our side of the door—a memory. We approach, open the door, enter, and a woman meets us. She is handsome, tanned, and she wears a gray suit, not a uniform but a suit. Past her, there are large leather chairs and recliners. Most are occupied by businessmen—some look European, they wear nice suits with slim legs, and some are American, they wear slacks and button-down shirts, they have gadgets attached to their belts—but there are families there as well, families traveling business class, kids playing with tablet computers or listening to music with headphones. It is quiet. It is a perfect place to snooze. The seats are deep and obviously soft. It's very full, Trish tells the woman. The woman says, with an English accent, even though she is clearly German, Normally it's less crowded. Everyone looks satisfied—what better way to take advantage of executive lounge privileges than to use it on a day when all the flights are delayed. Everyone looks at home here. The only thing that seems to have disturbed the equilibrium is our presence. Some of them are waiting to see if we'll be allowed to enter. Beyond the leather chairs and coffee tables is a dark bar with bottles glowing blue and gold and green on glass shelves, and there are huge red lampshades that hang from the ceiling. The lampshades, which are wide and round, remind me of a place, but I cannot remember where. The woman in the gray suit asks us for our boarding cards or our membership cards. I think of how I might begin to propose what we're proposing. I had a script in my head a few moments ago, but now that I see the lounge, now that I am standing in it, I realize that script has no value. What is to stop hundreds of people—economy passengers like us—from coming here, complaining of extreme fatigue, and begging for a seat to sleep on? If extreme fatigue were all one needed to get a seat in the executive lounge, everybody would be here. I can't speak. I'm overwhelmed, I suppose, by how obvious it is that we are not going to get my father a place to sleep, or by my embarrassment for having had the naivety to believe it was possible. I should return to him immediately—go get his headache pills and admit that this was a foolish attempt. But I don't move. I look up and remember why it is that those lampshades, which hang very low, seem so familiar. Then Trish begins to speak. I don't really listen to her, because I know it is pointless. The lampshades remind me of a lodge in Scotland, a little mansion on a lake in the Highlands. It was where my mother and father honeymooned, where they visited a few times thereafter, and it was where, after my mother's death, my father visited twice. The lampshades here remind me of the lampshades in the lodge restaurant. The restaurant has great big booth tables in the center of the dining room, all situated so that they face the lake, more or less, and all underneath a large red lampshade, which dimly illuminates the tabletop. It calls to mind Mafia or Rat Pack dinners in Vegas. My father always reserved the same booth. He and my mother sat there. He and my wife and I sat there once. Then he and I sat there, on our own, another time. I went there, not too long ago, by myself, but the booths were booked out. Miriam never came. She was invited, and my father and I both offered to pay for her, or help her afford the trip, but she always said money wasn't the problem—she was too busy. I know my father offered Miriam money a few times, but I don't think she ever took it. My father and Miriam didn't speak often, and he never saw her after she left home, twenty years ago. The time that had passed was how I argued to Trish, and to myself, against allowing my father to see or identify Miriam's body. He would not have known what he was looking at.

Trish says, I understand, of course. She's speaking to the woman in the gray suit. She turns to me and says, Let's try something else. I thank the woman for her time, even though I've missed the exchange. She tells me she's sorry they cannot accommodate my father. I hang on to the end of her sentence for a moment, because I am certain she's going to add something—an alternative solution. But she doesn't. She just smiles. I'm leaning a little forward now, so I straighten up. Of course, I say, it's no problem.

We decide to get my father's painkillers next. Trish rubs her temples and casually says that she needs something for a headache, too. I've been so fixated on my own lack of sleep that I've failed to notice hers. But she doesn't complain, or at least she doesn't complain to me. I still find it quite strange to look at Trish and think of her in the army, in places where real conflict was ongoing. I haven't asked her about it. I wouldn't know what to ask. I've always had a low opinion of people in the military. I've always had a low opinion of patriotism. My father finds Trish's background fascinating. I'm more interested in her work for the State Department. For the rest of her life, every four or five years she'll move to a new city. She'll learn a few more languages. She'll meet people from all over. She doesn't know where she'll go next. After Berlin, she'll go back to the States, probably for a year, then get posted somewhere else. It sounds like the perfect life, I said to her during our first week in Berlin, and it even felt true to say. If it suits you, it suits you, she said.

Trish points to a drugstore ahead of us. It's crowded. Like every shop, and every square inch of the terminal, it's crowded. Though it is a sick time of year, and there are many people who badly need cough syrup, cold and flu relief, or something to stop runny noses, the drugstore—I no longer call them drugstores, but Trish and my father call them drugstores—is mostly full of people who do not actually intend to buy anything. It reminds me of the way tourists walk through chapels and churches—they process very slowly, head vaguely for the altar, then circle back out, pretending to feel neither underwhelmed nor foolish. I can't really tell where the line begins. I just squirm through some people, then stand around and try to make eye contact with one of the people at the cash registers, which is, I've learned, how Germans queue. When I finally get eye contact, I tell the woman, in my rudimentary German, that I am looking for acetaminophen. She warns me that acetaminophen is actually a toxic substance that causes organ damage, and an overdose can lead to death. Trish, who is staring at her phone as we wait, briefly looks up to check that she heard the woman correctly. Ask for ibuprofen, she says. Do you have ibuprofen? I ask. She says she has ibuprofen. The woman is wearing a white lab coat and is very suntanned and wears tortoiseshell glasses that make her seem kinder than she actually is. Ibuprofen can change the structure of your kidneys, she says, after three or four years of continual use. Then she says, Your condition will improve tomorrow anyway, without medicine, but you can never repair the damage you might do to an organ. I look at Trish. I don't really understand what is happening, or what I should do next. Trish says, Germans don't take medication, they just suffer. I tell the woman I want the ibuprofen. I ask Trish if she wants her own box or if she just wants to have some of ours. She says she'll just take one from ours.