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A foolish but lovable airport.

Article Excerpt
It is very satisfying to be part of a dialogue in which a man invites a woman whom he's already given up on to come visit him at his parents' summer house, at the very moment when that woman still has a man inside watching basketball and waiting for her to come back into the apartment with the barbecued chicken legs. I leaned against the waist-high concrete wall that separates our two halves of the shared balcony, cantilevered over the smoke of somebody else's hamburgers being grilled one floor below, and said you could stay there as long as you wanted. That's what we always say when we invite people out to be a houseguest, and we always make it clear that they will have their own room.

"Of course I will," you said, as I waited for the implied comma and the neutralizing counter-clause, and when they did not come I was not sure what to do.

It was the one day of the year when white fluff from some kind of tree blew in the air and collected in little transparent drifts against the curb. We both looked up at an airplane that was going over, on its final approach to the airport two towns away, always the same aircraft, a homely, stubby little two-engine jet, this one painted up to look like Shamu, the Killer Whale. Then you went back to basting chicken legs, your back straight as a dancer's, the same easy slant over grill, and I went inside my own kitchen, knowing that words pronounced in chicken smoke can never be wholly false or wholly true. In literary theory, a statement like that is considered mystification, but I'll stand behind it.

So at least I was able to slide the glass door shut behind me and go back to being a professional kind of guy, with paperwork at the kitchen table, and a head full of positive thoughts on behalf of the category of all houseguests, at all cottages, those important strangers on whose account we will hope for a good flight and good weather. I know how it feels to be resting from the trip, the long hum of a turboprop still vibrating in your ears, in a gingham-wallpapered room silent with the breeze of white curtains.

That's a nice phrase. I should have said that, instead of just looking up into the air and wondering what cute themed livery (Star Wars, The Little Mermaid) the next aircraft to come over on finals will be painted up in. But that too would be a problem. People who work together should not accidentally live next door to each other, because they will end up unable to talk about anything but the airplanes that pass over, while one of them squats down gracefully, straight-backed over the grill, using a soft-bristled brush to put red sauce on the chicken for the unseen person who has come over to watch the basketball players run back and forth.

Maybe I shouldn't have brought the subject up--though my experience with subjects has been that when you bring them up it is exactly the same as not bringing them up. Maybe it's better just to think about it, about the word I love so much: houseguest. A houseguest is a privileged character. He or she does not need to get a preparatory orange tan from one of those radiation chambers that my doctor calls melanoma mattresses. You can get off the plane white as a potato and nobody will care, and you will have free access to as many sun-protection factors of sunblock as there is space for under the sink in the guests' bathroom.

A houseguest doesn't even have to be perfectly dressed. That idea is a big lie of cartoonists--one artist especially that I keep seeing almost...

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