Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [136]
She found herself in Evanston, got out, and took the return bus back. She had observed too much of the lake on the way. Lake Michigan was at its most decorative and bourgeois in the northern suburbs: whitecaps, blue water, waves lapping the shore, abjectly picturesque.
By afternoon she was sitting in O’Hare Airport, at gate 23A, the waiting area for a flight to Memphis. She wasn’t going to Memphis—she didn’t have a ticket to anywhere—and she wasn’t about to meet anyone, but she had decided to take Ovid’s advice to go where the crowds were, for the tonic effect. She had always liked the anonymity of airports anyway. A businessman carrying a laptop computer and whose face had a WASPy nondescript pudgy blankness fueled by liquor and avarice was raising his voice at the gate agent, an African-American woman. Men like that raised their voices and made demands as a way of life; it was as automatic and as thoughtless as cement turning and slopping around inside a cement mixer. “I don’t think you understand the situation,” he was saying. He had a standby ticket but had not been in the gate area when they had called his name, and now, the plane being full, he would have to take a later flight. “You have no understanding of my predicament here. Who is your superior?” His wingtip shoes were scuffed, and his suit was tailored one size too small for him, so that it bulged at the waist. He had combed strands of hair across his sizable bald spot. His forehead was damp with sweat, and his nose sported broken capillaries. He was not quite first-class. She decided to eat a chili dog and find another gate to sit in. Walking away, she heard the gate agent saying, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry.”
You couldn’t eat a chili dog in this airport sitting down. It was not permitted. You had to stand at the plastic counter of Here’s Mr. Chili, trying not to spill on the polyester guy reading USA Today, your volume of Publius Ovidius Naso next to you, your napkin in your other hand, thinking about Ovid’s exile to the fringe of the Roman empire, to Tomis, where, broken in spirit, solitary, he wrote the Tristia, some of the saddest poems written by anyone anywhere, but a—what?—male sadness about being far from where the action was. There was no action in Tomis, no glamour, no togas—just peasants and plenty of mud labor. On the opposite side of Here’s Mr. Chili was another gate where post-frightened passengers were scurrying out of the plane from Minneapolis. A woman in jeans and carrying a backpack fell into the arms of her boyfriend. They had started to kiss, the way people do in airports, in that depressing public style, all hands and tongues. And over here a chunky Scandinavian grandma was grasping her grandchildren in her arms like ships tied up tightly to a dock. You should go where people are happy, Ovid was saying. You should witness the high visibility of joy. You should believe. In …?
Si quis amas nec vis, facito contagia vites
Right, right: “If you don’t
want to love,
don’t expose yourself to
the sight
of love, the contagion.”
Evening would be coming on soon; she had to get back.
She was feeling a bit light-headed, the effect of the additives in the chili dog: the Red concourse of O’Hare, with its glacially smooth floors and reflecting surfaces, was, at the hour before twilight, the scariest man-made place she’d ever seen. This airport is really man-made, she thought. They don’t get more man-made than this. Of course, she had seen it a hundred times before, she just hadn’t bothered looking. If something hadn’t been hammered or fired, it wasn’t in this airport. Stone, metal, and glass, like the hyperextended surfaces of eternity, across which insect-people moved, briefly, trying before time ran out to find a designated anthill.