The Vision of Loveliness Had a Runny Nose

We entered the plane from the front and moved down to our seats. My wife Joyce’s was next to the window. Mine was in the middle. The aisle seat, next to mine, was empty.

That made it a “Hope Seat.” Maybe, after 30 years of marriage, it shouldn’t have been, but it was.

The Hope Seat is something almost all males over 13 recognize but never tell anyone about. Not our mothers or our sweethearts or our wives. They wouldn’t understand. Why should they . . . we don’t.

It’s just that when there’s an empty seat next to you, you always have that wild, irrational hope that the person who sits in it will be Sophia Loren or Liz Taylor or Linda Evans or maybe Brooke Shields.

That you’re married or engaged or even on your honeymoon has nothing to do with it. That you haven’t the least idea of what you would do in such a situation is not relevant; your inner self just accepts that as something to be mishandled later.

The fact that if it did happen, you’d probably be reduced to a quivering, drooling creature incapable of making any conversation above the level of animal noises has nothing to do with it. The Hope Seat is the Hope Seat.

Of course, when you get a few years on you, the dream tends to fade a little.

Mine kind of winked out when I saw her. The lady was slender, in her middle 30s but disheveled, wearing a rumpled black pantsuit and sporting a bad cold. She came down the aisle, scanning row and seat numbers, and stopped at our row.

“Hey,” she said, pushing some magazines under the empty seat. She jammed her carry-on under the seat in front of her.

“Ummm,” I said. It’s an expression I’d learned in England. Having just had a mint myself, I offered my new seat partner one.

“Yeah,” she said. She popped it into her mouth and started to sniffle.

When I offered Joyce one, she shook her head. “They smell a little strong for me. It reminds me of the old days, when mothers used to smear Vapo-Rub or Mentholatum on the kids’ chests when they had colds. Your mother ever do that?”

Joyce was right, but the smell wasn’t caused by my mints. Somebody in the immediate vicinity was “greasing a cold.” My seat partner, the Lady in Black, sniffled. She never stopped during the 4 1/2 hours we spent together.

She opened a New York City newspaper. Joyce was working a crossword puzzle. I read the “Fasten Seat Belt/No Smoking” sign a few times and waited for the takeoff, quietly relishing the excitement but trying to look cool. I love the takeoffs. I love the whole enchilada.

My first airplane was named The Spirit of St. Louis. It had a red propeller, blue wings and if I peddled like crazy, I could really make that little bugger go.

Never did get her up to flying speed. Just as well, because I was only about 3 years old. But I tried.

I’ve always been crazy about flying. My favorite boyhood magazine was Flying Aces, and my hobby was model airplanes.

Aside from a first car, my first two major purchases were airplanes. I flew the tail off the first, a little two-seat Luscombe Silvaire, and kept myself in a constant state of terror with the second, a PT-22, which was a war-surplus aerobatic trainer that had a mind of its own and seemed to think its glide angle was straight down.

I fly every chance I get, and I’ve almost never had a bad flight . . . till the one with The Lady in Black.

We had taxied to the runway and were holding for takeoff. The cabin crew made a last check of seat belts. The Lady in Black finished a section of her paper and tossed it into my lap. “Good paper.” She sniffled. “You don’t want it?”

“Well, yeah,” I said.

“You don’t want it, throw it on the floor. Don’t do me any favors.”

I said “Ummm” again. She sniffled heartily and the plane took off.

As the 727 climbed, the little air squirters in the overhead started to circulate the air. That’s their whole act, those little nozzles--they just circulate the air that’s already aboard. Although there’s a filter system involved, it’s about as efficient as what you’d find on a bus or a train, really not designed to filter out anything smaller than a bat or a small bird.

The Lady in Black sniffled and chucked another section of her paper onto my lap. Joyce leaned out to see where all the paper and sniffling was coming from. It got her a hard look for her trouble.

A few minutes later the lady folded what was left of the newspaper, then stood and bent over to peer into my face. “Listen,” she ordered, “if the waitress comes, get me a tomato juice. I want it on the rocks with a twist of lemon peel. You got that?”

“Stirred but not shaken?” I asked.

“Huh?” she answered.

“I think flight attendants like to be called flight attendants,” I said.

“Hey, is that my problem? That’s her problem. Look, I’m just going to the can. If you can’t handle the juice thing, OK. Just forget it, got that? Never mind.”

One industrial-strength sniffle and she headed toward the back.

I seized the opportunity to visit the rear of the plane myself, but getting as far as the aisle was a problem. I stepped on the lady’s pile of magazines. They immediately slipped all over each other, making me look like a bear on ice and almost landing me on the lap of a man across the aisle.

He was working on his air squirter. “You wearing Tiger Balm?” he asked.

“Sir?”

“You know, “ he said, “Tiger Balm . . . the muscle rub? Like Deep Heat? The fumes are starting to make my eyes water.”

I told him I wasn’t and went on toward the back. When I returned, the aisle seat was still empty.

When the Lady in Black returned 10 minutes later and found that she didn’t have her tomato juice on the rocks with a twist, she tried to turn me to stone with a look. I pretended I didn’t see it, but it made me feel a little gravelly around the edges.

The flight attendant announced three choices for lunch. Joyce and I had the chicken, which tasted like it had Vicks on its chest. I don’t know what The Lady in Black was having, but whatever it was, she was pushing it around more than eating it. “Not a very exciting lunch,” I offered.

“I’m never excited about airline food,” she said. “And I certainly couldn’t enjoy it anyway with someone staring at me while I eat.”

“Who’s staring at you?”

“You are, and I think you’re very rude. Very rude.”

Always on top of things and ready with a rejoinder, I said, “Ah, well, er, I, ahh, um, ya see, I ah. Sorry.”

Joyce gave me a sweet smile. “Maybe you ought to ask for your mint back,” she whispered.

I smarted for a while and worked out things I should have said, like, “How do you handle dinner dates?” or “Oh, yeah.” But it started me thinking.

Joyce and I had boarded the plane in Chicago. The Lady in Black had been in New York City that morning. She could have been traveling from abroad for Lord knows how many hours before that. She might have been a very nice lady, just jet-lagged beyond her endurance.

Although intellectually I know that with a little work she could have been nice looking, I tend to remember her as the Ayatollah in drag. Yet it occurred to me that she really could have been another Mother Theresa, just going through a siege of severe jet lag. I wondered briefly whether I was being too judgmental. But only briefly.

When we landed at LAX a crisp, clean hot Santa Ana was blowing right off the desert. It smelled great.

We saw the Lady in Black at the baggage carrousel.

Somebody had come to meet her, and she appeared to be giving him a hard time. She looked a little less like the Ayatollah, but she was definitely not Mother Theresa.

When we got into the van for the trip from the airport to Canoga Park, the driver asked if we’d had a good flight.

“Great,” I said.

“Great?” said Joyce. “You sat next to a woman with the manners of an alligator, who spent five hours snorting her way into our hearts. We had a meal we couldn’t eat, and neither one of us will be able to smell anything except eucalyptus and oil of wintergreen for a month and you say it was a great flight?”

“Well, the flight itself is what I’m talking about,” I said. “You’ve gotta admit, it was as smooth as glass.”

So if I thought it was so great, why did I say earlier that it was one of the only bad flights in my life?

First, it was 10 days ago and I’m now fighting the grandfather of all colds. When you’ve gone through all the facial tissue in the house and you’re working on computer print-out paper, that’s a heavy cold.

Second, after reading this piece, Joyce informed me she has recognized the Hope Seat for years and has been waiting for Clark Gable, Burt Lancaster or Tom Selleck (successively) to come and sit in it since she was 13 years old.

I don’t know as I like that.