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The Man in the Window Seat
By Robert Granader
He pinches and pulls at the pictures on his phone, deciphering them like code. Every now and then he gets distracted and focuses on a background: a pair of boots, a fancy car. But mostly he studies the face, as if he’s preparing to write a dissertation comparing it to the Mona Lisa.
His fingers move from site to site, photo to photo with the dexterity of a fifteen-year-old gamer.
But he appears closer to my age.
All I can see is an ear, closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and a three- day-old-stubbled cheek. He looks to be chronologically somewhere in midlife, but he clearly works at staving off the aging process. My guess is there is a racquet and a basketball floating in the back seat of his car, and he brings along a gym bag on business trips, even if it’s just overnight to Cleveland.
It’s incredible how much I can see from the middle seat I am wedged into. He is in the row in front of me, on the window, and we are at thirty thousand feet somewhere over states where the SEC conference plays football games.
I don’t recognize the website; at first I think it’s some kind of porn where you can talk to the stars.
“I’m on a plane,” he writes.
Is he trying to impress her? I mean he splurged for the Wi-Fi? Big deal. Is this foreplay?
Soon, I learn it’s a dating site and online dating is all about trying to impress with subtle bragging comments, pictures of fabulous places, and explanations of how amicable the divorce was or how bad the ex-spouse is.
“Heading home from Florida,” he writes, then pauses. Then starts again: “I was in a softball tournament.”
This man whose name I will never know smiles at his message and sends it. The woman on the other end responds quickly about how she loves softball: “My father taught me to throw, I played second base!”
The look on the side of his face suggests he is pleased, like a fisherman who feels a bite. Soon he’s rifling through his photos and sends one. It’s a softball team photo of other middle-aged men. His teammates are mostly pot-bellied blokes who look more appropriate to aging softballers, making him look all the better by comparison. In the photo they are all geared up for a game that, by their smiles, appears to be a very big deal.
His fingers move from site to site, photo to photo with the dexterity of a fifteen-year-old gamer.
But he appears closer to my age.
All I can see is an ear, closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and a three- day-old-stubbled cheek. He looks to be chronologically somewhere in midlife, but he clearly works at staving off the aging process. My guess is there is a racquet and a basketball floating in the back seat of his car, and he brings along a gym bag on business trips, even if it’s just overnight to Cleveland.
It’s incredible how much I can see from the middle seat I am wedged into. He is in the row in front of me, on the window, and we are at thirty thousand feet somewhere over states where the SEC conference plays football games.
I don’t recognize the website; at first I think it’s some kind of porn where you can talk to the stars.
“I’m on a plane,” he writes.
Is he trying to impress her? I mean he splurged for the Wi-Fi? Big deal. Is this foreplay?
Soon, I learn it’s a dating site and online dating is all about trying to impress with subtle bragging comments, pictures of fabulous places, and explanations of how amicable the divorce was or how bad the ex-spouse is.
“Heading home from Florida,” he writes, then pauses. Then starts again: “I was in a softball tournament.”
This man whose name I will never know smiles at his message and sends it. The woman on the other end responds quickly about how she loves softball: “My father taught me to throw, I played second base!”
The look on the side of his face suggests he is pleased, like a fisherman who feels a bite. Soon he’s rifling through his photos and sends one. It’s a softball team photo of other middle-aged men. His teammates are mostly pot-bellied blokes who look more appropriate to aging softballers, making him look all the better by comparison. In the photo they are all geared up for a game that, by their smiles, appears to be a very big deal.
Either his interest waned or his ADD kicked in, but he flips to another woman and continues a previous conversation: “I have the kids every other week,” he writes.
“I’ve got them five days a week,” she responds.
“That sucks,” he writes and then winces after sending.
“Your kids are adorable,” a message pops up, and he flips around to find the woman who wrote that.
I’m not sure how it works, but there appears to be an endless supply of women on his phone. In my fifties, I know nothing of these apps; they were born well after my dating days ended. I have no familiarity with the screens, the log-ins, or whether one swipes left or right. This guy is a pro.
What this man was looking for in these pictures I did not know, but I couldn’t help but think of all the things I didn’t know when I got married. The game of dating in my twenties wasn’t different just because it was thirty years ago, but rather because of who I was back then, all hopped up on all the things that feed into bad decision-making: adrenaline, testosterone, and youthful exuberance.
This guy has history and mistakes to give him perspective.
Back then there were no pictures to pinch, no profiles to read, no likes or dislikes, no swipes or emojis. There was no way to meet people when you traveled to a new city except through serendipity or awkward bar conversation.
But here is this guy meeting more women in one flight than I met in all the bars, all the blind dates, all the classes, the dorms, and diners in the years I was single. I met Terri the old-fashioned way: we had friends in common. A group of us met up at a bar called the 21st Amendment—only in Washington, DC could there be a bar named for the amendment ending Prohibition and everyone gets the joke.
We dated, fought, broke up, then married, moved to the suburbs, and had kids, all by the time we were thirty. And now, in our mid-fifties, something stopped. I still love her but we are living side by side. But isn’t that how it is at this point? What had been a happy family of four is now four individuals where the kids live on each coast and the two adults live in separate sections of a half-abandoned house.
Terri’s ubiquitous white AirPods are a message that she isn’t in the “talking mood.” She plugs in while she’s cooking dinner; she plugs in as she and her second glass of white wine waft into a sitting room.
Frustrated, at first I’d march into my office and bury myself in work papers. She doesn’t turn off the lights or let out the dog, she just goes upstairs at some point and gets into bed. I know this from the sound of the water in the faucets and the small sound machine that fills our bedroom with white noise.
It’s a sign that it’s okay for me to leave my room, maybe finish my half glass of red wine, close up the house, and make my way upstairs, where I feel around for my bed in the noisy darkness and slide under the cool sheets.
But the man in the window seat is far from this. He is focused and busy, his hands working in overdrive, as if he needed to find a mate before we land in Detroit. Frustration burnished on his face. He either wasn’t seeing what he liked or finding what he wanted when he pinched and zoomed on the profile.
I realized how little I know of his life. Not because I have no idea who he is and could only identify him by a birthmark just under his right ear. But because men don’t talk about divorce and dating, even though the number of divorced friends in my orbit has grown in recent years. At our twentieth wedding anniversary, there were less than a handful of divorced friends. And most of those didn’t make it out of the starting gate—a year or two into marriage, no kids, still renting. A mulligan.
But as our thirtieth anniversary approaches, the ranks grow.
When you divorce in your fifties, it counts. There are children to tell, real assets to split. I thought more would divorce when the kids were young, money struggles in full force and the challenge of the children. In our thirties and forties we recognize the difficulty of making ends meet financially while balancing a satisfying marriage and work life. But we blindly think that is the way it is supposed to be at that age.
However, as we sink deeper into middle age one begins playing the “back nine,” and you ask different questions. Am I happy? Is this the life I want? Why am I not happier? And you go searching.
At this age the challenge of answering the unanswered questions of adulthood begins.
Divorce is still a mystery. I’ve asked almost all my divorced friends the same question: How did you know it was over? Rarely, if ever, do they have an answer. There was no moment, no act of betrayal. Instead it was like a Jenga tower falling, the accumulation of so much, and then the taking away of the important parts.
For some there was an event: an infidelity, anything from a rendezvous outside a restaurant, a hand on a thigh, to a full-blown relationship that was admitted out of guilt or found out of recklessness.
But my male friends are pretty close-mouthed. I hear something from my wife while she is on the phone in hushed tones with other women from the neighborhood.
And then the even more distant planet of affairs: “How did it start?” I asked out of sheer fascination.
The only one who ever gave me a glimpse is my college roommate Greg. I’m a safe one to tell because we live in different states, his wife never liked me, and there’s enough history for me to ask questions like this and for him to satisfy me with a drop of juice.
“How did it start?” I ask on one of our annual golf trips.
He didn’t say anything at first. We’d been drinking much of the day, and my guard was down and I guess his was too.
“What a risk,” I say too loud and with too much judgment. “I remember the fear of aching to kiss Laura Madison in seventh grade, and the stakes were puny.” My only risk was the sting of humiliation during the walk of shame in those long hallways.
But the risk of attempting to kiss a woman who might know you’re married or a friend’s wife, someone in your orbit—a wrong read, and the results could be catastrophic.
“You know how many friends I have whose wives don’t want to fuck them?” he said without emotion. “When we were first married, I remember standing at my sink brushing my teeth, and at the other sink was my wife washing her face, naked. Can you imagine a world where I could brush my teeth and look at a naked woman?”
“I’ve got them five days a week,” she responds.
“That sucks,” he writes and then winces after sending.
“Your kids are adorable,” a message pops up, and he flips around to find the woman who wrote that.
I’m not sure how it works, but there appears to be an endless supply of women on his phone. In my fifties, I know nothing of these apps; they were born well after my dating days ended. I have no familiarity with the screens, the log-ins, or whether one swipes left or right. This guy is a pro.
What this man was looking for in these pictures I did not know, but I couldn’t help but think of all the things I didn’t know when I got married. The game of dating in my twenties wasn’t different just because it was thirty years ago, but rather because of who I was back then, all hopped up on all the things that feed into bad decision-making: adrenaline, testosterone, and youthful exuberance.
This guy has history and mistakes to give him perspective.
Back then there were no pictures to pinch, no profiles to read, no likes or dislikes, no swipes or emojis. There was no way to meet people when you traveled to a new city except through serendipity or awkward bar conversation.
But here is this guy meeting more women in one flight than I met in all the bars, all the blind dates, all the classes, the dorms, and diners in the years I was single. I met Terri the old-fashioned way: we had friends in common. A group of us met up at a bar called the 21st Amendment—only in Washington, DC could there be a bar named for the amendment ending Prohibition and everyone gets the joke.
We dated, fought, broke up, then married, moved to the suburbs, and had kids, all by the time we were thirty. And now, in our mid-fifties, something stopped. I still love her but we are living side by side. But isn’t that how it is at this point? What had been a happy family of four is now four individuals where the kids live on each coast and the two adults live in separate sections of a half-abandoned house.
Terri’s ubiquitous white AirPods are a message that she isn’t in the “talking mood.” She plugs in while she’s cooking dinner; she plugs in as she and her second glass of white wine waft into a sitting room.
Frustrated, at first I’d march into my office and bury myself in work papers. She doesn’t turn off the lights or let out the dog, she just goes upstairs at some point and gets into bed. I know this from the sound of the water in the faucets and the small sound machine that fills our bedroom with white noise.
It’s a sign that it’s okay for me to leave my room, maybe finish my half glass of red wine, close up the house, and make my way upstairs, where I feel around for my bed in the noisy darkness and slide under the cool sheets.
But the man in the window seat is far from this. He is focused and busy, his hands working in overdrive, as if he needed to find a mate before we land in Detroit. Frustration burnished on his face. He either wasn’t seeing what he liked or finding what he wanted when he pinched and zoomed on the profile.
I realized how little I know of his life. Not because I have no idea who he is and could only identify him by a birthmark just under his right ear. But because men don’t talk about divorce and dating, even though the number of divorced friends in my orbit has grown in recent years. At our twentieth wedding anniversary, there were less than a handful of divorced friends. And most of those didn’t make it out of the starting gate—a year or two into marriage, no kids, still renting. A mulligan.
But as our thirtieth anniversary approaches, the ranks grow.
When you divorce in your fifties, it counts. There are children to tell, real assets to split. I thought more would divorce when the kids were young, money struggles in full force and the challenge of the children. In our thirties and forties we recognize the difficulty of making ends meet financially while balancing a satisfying marriage and work life. But we blindly think that is the way it is supposed to be at that age.
However, as we sink deeper into middle age one begins playing the “back nine,” and you ask different questions. Am I happy? Is this the life I want? Why am I not happier? And you go searching.
At this age the challenge of answering the unanswered questions of adulthood begins.
Divorce is still a mystery. I’ve asked almost all my divorced friends the same question: How did you know it was over? Rarely, if ever, do they have an answer. There was no moment, no act of betrayal. Instead it was like a Jenga tower falling, the accumulation of so much, and then the taking away of the important parts.
For some there was an event: an infidelity, anything from a rendezvous outside a restaurant, a hand on a thigh, to a full-blown relationship that was admitted out of guilt or found out of recklessness.
But my male friends are pretty close-mouthed. I hear something from my wife while she is on the phone in hushed tones with other women from the neighborhood.
And then the even more distant planet of affairs: “How did it start?” I asked out of sheer fascination.
The only one who ever gave me a glimpse is my college roommate Greg. I’m a safe one to tell because we live in different states, his wife never liked me, and there’s enough history for me to ask questions like this and for him to satisfy me with a drop of juice.
“How did it start?” I ask on one of our annual golf trips.
He didn’t say anything at first. We’d been drinking much of the day, and my guard was down and I guess his was too.
“What a risk,” I say too loud and with too much judgment. “I remember the fear of aching to kiss Laura Madison in seventh grade, and the stakes were puny.” My only risk was the sting of humiliation during the walk of shame in those long hallways.
But the risk of attempting to kiss a woman who might know you’re married or a friend’s wife, someone in your orbit—a wrong read, and the results could be catastrophic.
“You know how many friends I have whose wives don’t want to fuck them?” he said without emotion. “When we were first married, I remember standing at my sink brushing my teeth, and at the other sink was my wife washing her face, naked. Can you imagine a world where I could brush my teeth and look at a naked woman?”
He never tells me how it happened. I think he was justifying it.
“Anything to drink?” the stewardess asks the man in the window seat for the third time. He takes his ear pods out and looks annoyed. He waves her off. His wave is unpleasant, dismissive, rude, but I am filled with a mixture of sympathy and admiration for the guy. He is locked into his world of finding a spouse, a mate, a partner. He is no different than the animals I see on Animal Planet searching for a mate. Unlikely to reproduce at his age but he wants all the things a partner provides, including security, peace of mind, a person who knows when you’re landing.
Suddenly his fingers stop moving.
The man in the window seat has stopped searching for now. Not because he has settled on someone or something, not because he found something deep inside those pictures. On his screen is a family photo. I lean forward to see if I can age it, how long ago it was taken, with him as my only marker of time in this world where my view is as tiny as the slice of sun that reaches me from the window, lights up his phone, and reflects back.
It’s an outdoor picture, a backyard shot, maybe from a holiday; the leaves are changing, it’s fall in the Midwest. I don’t know the year. His hair is longer and darker in the photo. There are three children. A woman is seated, two boys in their early teens standing on either side of her; a girl a few years older stands next to her father.
He is not pinching and prodding this photo. He knows it all too well, including the players who line it end to end. But there is a wife, and I wonder what that means. Is this an old photo stuck in his images, or is there more to the story? Maybe I’ve misread him.
Maybe his wife cheated on him and he is just trying to get his footing on this slippery rock.
Oh God, maybe she’s dead, gone from cancer or a car wreck, and this poor guy is burying himself in flashes of women to make the pain go away.
No, his wife went missing, and he is searching for her. That’s the pinching—he only finds women who look like her, dark hair, round face, big eyes.
Any of these can be true, but it’s probably just divorce. He stares at the picture. He is sad, not tearful, but longing maybe? And then he looks out the window at the clouds.
Suddenly his fingers stop moving.
The man in the window seat has stopped searching for now. Not because he has settled on someone or something, not because he found something deep inside those pictures. On his screen is a family photo. I lean forward to see if I can age it, how long ago it was taken, with him as my only marker of time in this world where my view is as tiny as the slice of sun that reaches me from the window, lights up his phone, and reflects back.
It’s an outdoor picture, a backyard shot, maybe from a holiday; the leaves are changing, it’s fall in the Midwest. I don’t know the year. His hair is longer and darker in the photo. There are three children. A woman is seated, two boys in their early teens standing on either side of her; a girl a few years older stands next to her father.
He is not pinching and prodding this photo. He knows it all too well, including the players who line it end to end. But there is a wife, and I wonder what that means. Is this an old photo stuck in his images, or is there more to the story? Maybe I’ve misread him.
Maybe his wife cheated on him and he is just trying to get his footing on this slippery rock.
Oh God, maybe she’s dead, gone from cancer or a car wreck, and this poor guy is burying himself in flashes of women to make the pain go away.
No, his wife went missing, and he is searching for her. That’s the pinching—he only finds women who look like her, dark hair, round face, big eyes.
Any of these can be true, but it’s probably just divorce. He stares at the picture. He is sad, not tearful, but longing maybe? And then he looks out the window at the clouds.
Is this what he does when he tires of searching? He goes back home? Or is he rethinking everything? Is there a chance to save the marriage?
Wait. He told one of the women he shares custody. These kids would be in college by now. What’s he telling them? He’s too handsome to be this lonely, but he is lonely, I can feel it in my bones. Every other picture is like porn. He is looking for something he likes, but now he isn’t looking for anything.
The man in the window seat stops analyzing the clouds, and his family recedes again as he scrolls up and looks at the photo of another woman. He simultaneously pulls it close, squints, and pinches it to zoom. This woman appears to be in her forties or fifties. It’s only from the waist up, and she is wearing some sort of wrap. Her top is covered by a black one-piece bathing suit. She is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and large, Jackie O sunglasses.
His name is Ron, as I can see from the way he signs his texts, but to me he is the man in the window seat. It’s February and he is traveling from sunshine to rain, from heat to cold, from blue to gray.
Why do I spend so much time on this guy?
Because this is what I do.
I can hear my wife’s voice in my head: “Stop looking in other people’s windows.”
And my interest? Always a voyeur, my wife would scold. A nighttime walk with the dog and my wife, when she used to join me. When it was dark outside in the fall, bright lights inside all these houses illuminating the interior, the participants. Not the scene, but the actors.
“Don’t put the shade down,” I say to the couple in the upstairs bedroom who have been arguing, as our dog, Nippy, pees on every flower and tree trunk along the way.
“What are you looking for?” she’d ask. And I struggled to answer.
“A naked back, the side of a boob?” she’d chide.
“I don’t look upstairs,” I tell her, justifying my interest. “I just wonder what everybody else does. You know, with their free time. I think it’s pretty normal.”
“It’s not normal and stop looking.”
“Do you think I don’t look when you’re not here? So what’s the difference?”
“It’s weird and I don’t want to see it,” she says.
“I’m looking straight ahead, I promise.”
I look around the plane. Everyone is plugged in to something; their ears or their eyes are covered. Either sleeping or watching, almost no one is even reading, let alone reading their neighbor’s phone.
But the man in the window seat in the row in front of me, who hasn’t looked up long enough to know if he’s sitting next to a man or a woman, studies a new face. Is he looking for signs from above? What can he possibly get from looking more closely into a picture that was taken long before she posted it, before she cropped it and cleaned it up around the eyes and the thighs?
Even though I can’t see his eyes, I notice some squinting. He’s looking for some guidance, something he isn’t getting from the text exchange.
Does he think the closer he gets to her face, the clearer the signs will be? Will he find out from her face that they will be compatible? Does he read lines? Is there something in the background of this staged and airbrushed photo that will tell him she will be a good partner, and never cheat on him, and be good to his kids, and help him later when his parents are sick, and understand that there are times when he’s just scared?
He leaves the page and moves on to another woman without finishing the conversation.
On the other end of his text chain is a woman waiting. If he decides to drop the previous woman he can blame it on unsteady Wi-Fi.
Every view I get of what he sees is distorted by my aging eyes, distance, inconsistent light. But the picture he lands on is familiar.
The curly hair in this picture I know as if it were my own, but more than that, I recognize the surroundings. I recognized it because I’d paid for it, I’d lived it, I’d known it. I wanted to tell him to move his hand because I needed to see something. I think that was our old dog in the background. The little mutt had been dead five years; that picture was from Thanksgiving almost ten years ago.
I wanted to tell him that’s an old picture, and she photoshopped out some people, and wait, those are my disembodied fingers on her shoulder before she wiped her family out of the photo. The multicolored painting in the background we bought together at a street fair in Greenwich Village. The rug was the first thing we purchased for that room. She’d told me: “You build a room around a rug.”
He is studying the picture, he is studying my wife! I freeze. I can’t say anything to him, I can’t breathe. It’s another hour until we land. I’m sweating and my heart is pushing my chest in a way that makes my shirt heave.
Maybe I’m wrong. It’s getting dark on the plane, and my eyes are tired from all the squinting and peering. My confidence in what I’d seen shatters. I don’t know what he was doing. I don’t think that’s my wife. I don’t know anything about him or about me.
He swipes and a text quickly pops up.
“Hey,” is all she types.
“Hey,” he writes back. “I think we have a lot in common.”
Usually this is the moment when he switches to another woman and starts an additional conversation. Instead he puts the phone down on his lap, takes a deep breath, and stands.
Wait, where is he going?
My gaze follows him to the back of the plane and the bathroom.
He’s going to the bathroom with his phone. What if he has the conversation in there? What if he talks to my wife while he’s on the crapper, and I’m sitting out here in a middle seat like an idiot?
She would never go for him, I convince myself, as if that’s the most important thing going right now, not that she’s on a dating app in the first place. If he starts sending her his softball pictures, I’m gonna laugh because that’s what she’d be doing too.
He’s in the bathroom for what seems like hours, but it must have been minutes, and when he returns he leaves his phone in his pocket. For the first time in more than an hour of flight time, he is no longer interested in exploring the various faces and bodies of the women who cross his digital path.
I am staring at him now, hoping my vision radiates his body like Superman and causes him to either go blind, so I can delude myself that this never happened, or open up his phone so I can see how this story ends.
Like any addict, he resumes, popping open his phone and chatting up my wife.
“Have we met before?” he asks her. I guess their names aren’t given, but there must be some inkling of recognition.
“I don’t believe so,” she says. She doesn’t even talk this way; normally she would just say, “Hell no.”
“Are you divorced?” he asks.
“Separated,” she answers.
Separated? We are not. I just left for a meeting in Florida, and I’d be back home in a couple of days. We are together, we are married, happily married.
“My wife died,” he tells her.
That’s a lie. He told the other woman, the one with the bushy hair, that he has the kids fifty-fifty. His wife isn’t dead. And he told the other woman, the one who clearly got a bad nose job, that his divorce was brutal, and that’s why he isn’t sure he wants to marry again.
And now he’s telling my wife he’s a widower?
He’s sick.
“How long have you been separated?” he asks.
“Not long,” she says.
“What happened?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she writes, “you know how it is.”
“Do you think you’ll get divorced?” he asks.
She seems to ignore him.
I’m waiting, he’s waiting. There are no dots like with a text when people are writing. We are in a nether world of not knowing if she is writing, waiting, gone elsewhere. We hadn’t noticed that we’d gone below ten thousand feet and the Wi-Fi had dropped. Calls were done. He had no way of knowing. I had no way of knowing.
I am in darkness. The plane is about to land. He’s been cut off, and I’m unalterably severed from his world, my world. The plane screeches down uneventfully, and I stand well before our row was ready to leave, inching my way to the aisle. The man in the window seat is oblivious to my stares, as he is to everybody he leans over and bumps into.
I race past some people as we exit the plane. I can now see his full face, hustling to keep up with his aggressive and athletic stride. I have no luggage but follow him to baggage claim as he waits and resumes the hunt.
My wife has resumed typing to him but I cannot see his phone. I am no longer hidden in the shadows of the eighteenth row. Now I am next to the man from the window seat and he can feel me. I usually alert my wife when I land but I’m afraid, I don’t want another awkward conversation, another argument, another problem. I just want things to be normal again. Like they were before the fights, before the last kid went off to college. I knew I was unhappy, but I didn’t know she was this unhappy.
“I love you,” I type into my text. I forget to say I landed. I search for the emoji, the heart, the smiling guy with the hearts in his eyes, and send it.
She calls.
I’m nervous to pick up, but I do it after the first ring.
“What the hell is this?” she asks.
“What?”
“Do you know the last words you said to me?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Because it wasn’t goodbye when you left, because you didn’t say goodbye,” she screams. “And it wasn’t good-night the night before you left. And then you were gone for three more nights, and there were no words, no emojis, and for sure there were no hearts.”
“I missed you,” I said.
“Fuck you, Jimmy. I’ve missed you for the past two years. Ever since Eden went off to college. Now you miss me? Why?”
It was as if she’d known why I said I missed her, like she knew I’d been looking, watching, over the shoulder of the guy in 17C.
“I’ve been waiting, and you weren’t in the mood to give. All of a sudden you miss me? All of a sudden you love me?”
“I’ll be home soon, we can talk then—” But before I could finish, she hung up. I needed to get home and see her. Did I miss her or was I just mad at the guy in the window seat?
She was right. I haven’t spoken to her in three days. Did I try calling her? I look up and the guy from the window seat is gone. I don’t know where he went, back to his old world. But I can’t get back to mine.
Wait. He told one of the women he shares custody. These kids would be in college by now. What’s he telling them? He’s too handsome to be this lonely, but he is lonely, I can feel it in my bones. Every other picture is like porn. He is looking for something he likes, but now he isn’t looking for anything.
The man in the window seat stops analyzing the clouds, and his family recedes again as he scrolls up and looks at the photo of another woman. He simultaneously pulls it close, squints, and pinches it to zoom. This woman appears to be in her forties or fifties. It’s only from the waist up, and she is wearing some sort of wrap. Her top is covered by a black one-piece bathing suit. She is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and large, Jackie O sunglasses.
His name is Ron, as I can see from the way he signs his texts, but to me he is the man in the window seat. It’s February and he is traveling from sunshine to rain, from heat to cold, from blue to gray.
Why do I spend so much time on this guy?
Because this is what I do.
I can hear my wife’s voice in my head: “Stop looking in other people’s windows.”
And my interest? Always a voyeur, my wife would scold. A nighttime walk with the dog and my wife, when she used to join me. When it was dark outside in the fall, bright lights inside all these houses illuminating the interior, the participants. Not the scene, but the actors.
“Don’t put the shade down,” I say to the couple in the upstairs bedroom who have been arguing, as our dog, Nippy, pees on every flower and tree trunk along the way.
“What are you looking for?” she’d ask. And I struggled to answer.
“A naked back, the side of a boob?” she’d chide.
“I don’t look upstairs,” I tell her, justifying my interest. “I just wonder what everybody else does. You know, with their free time. I think it’s pretty normal.”
“It’s not normal and stop looking.”
“Do you think I don’t look when you’re not here? So what’s the difference?”
“It’s weird and I don’t want to see it,” she says.
“I’m looking straight ahead, I promise.”
I look around the plane. Everyone is plugged in to something; their ears or their eyes are covered. Either sleeping or watching, almost no one is even reading, let alone reading their neighbor’s phone.
But the man in the window seat in the row in front of me, who hasn’t looked up long enough to know if he’s sitting next to a man or a woman, studies a new face. Is he looking for signs from above? What can he possibly get from looking more closely into a picture that was taken long before she posted it, before she cropped it and cleaned it up around the eyes and the thighs?
Even though I can’t see his eyes, I notice some squinting. He’s looking for some guidance, something he isn’t getting from the text exchange.
Does he think the closer he gets to her face, the clearer the signs will be? Will he find out from her face that they will be compatible? Does he read lines? Is there something in the background of this staged and airbrushed photo that will tell him she will be a good partner, and never cheat on him, and be good to his kids, and help him later when his parents are sick, and understand that there are times when he’s just scared?
He leaves the page and moves on to another woman without finishing the conversation.
On the other end of his text chain is a woman waiting. If he decides to drop the previous woman he can blame it on unsteady Wi-Fi.
Every view I get of what he sees is distorted by my aging eyes, distance, inconsistent light. But the picture he lands on is familiar.
The curly hair in this picture I know as if it were my own, but more than that, I recognize the surroundings. I recognized it because I’d paid for it, I’d lived it, I’d known it. I wanted to tell him to move his hand because I needed to see something. I think that was our old dog in the background. The little mutt had been dead five years; that picture was from Thanksgiving almost ten years ago.
I wanted to tell him that’s an old picture, and she photoshopped out some people, and wait, those are my disembodied fingers on her shoulder before she wiped her family out of the photo. The multicolored painting in the background we bought together at a street fair in Greenwich Village. The rug was the first thing we purchased for that room. She’d told me: “You build a room around a rug.”
He is studying the picture, he is studying my wife! I freeze. I can’t say anything to him, I can’t breathe. It’s another hour until we land. I’m sweating and my heart is pushing my chest in a way that makes my shirt heave.
Maybe I’m wrong. It’s getting dark on the plane, and my eyes are tired from all the squinting and peering. My confidence in what I’d seen shatters. I don’t know what he was doing. I don’t think that’s my wife. I don’t know anything about him or about me.
He swipes and a text quickly pops up.
“Hey,” is all she types.
“Hey,” he writes back. “I think we have a lot in common.”
Usually this is the moment when he switches to another woman and starts an additional conversation. Instead he puts the phone down on his lap, takes a deep breath, and stands.
Wait, where is he going?
My gaze follows him to the back of the plane and the bathroom.
He’s going to the bathroom with his phone. What if he has the conversation in there? What if he talks to my wife while he’s on the crapper, and I’m sitting out here in a middle seat like an idiot?
She would never go for him, I convince myself, as if that’s the most important thing going right now, not that she’s on a dating app in the first place. If he starts sending her his softball pictures, I’m gonna laugh because that’s what she’d be doing too.
He’s in the bathroom for what seems like hours, but it must have been minutes, and when he returns he leaves his phone in his pocket. For the first time in more than an hour of flight time, he is no longer interested in exploring the various faces and bodies of the women who cross his digital path.
I am staring at him now, hoping my vision radiates his body like Superman and causes him to either go blind, so I can delude myself that this never happened, or open up his phone so I can see how this story ends.
Like any addict, he resumes, popping open his phone and chatting up my wife.
“Have we met before?” he asks her. I guess their names aren’t given, but there must be some inkling of recognition.
“I don’t believe so,” she says. She doesn’t even talk this way; normally she would just say, “Hell no.”
“Are you divorced?” he asks.
“Separated,” she answers.
Separated? We are not. I just left for a meeting in Florida, and I’d be back home in a couple of days. We are together, we are married, happily married.
“My wife died,” he tells her.
That’s a lie. He told the other woman, the one with the bushy hair, that he has the kids fifty-fifty. His wife isn’t dead. And he told the other woman, the one who clearly got a bad nose job, that his divorce was brutal, and that’s why he isn’t sure he wants to marry again.
And now he’s telling my wife he’s a widower?
He’s sick.
“How long have you been separated?” he asks.
“Not long,” she says.
“What happened?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she writes, “you know how it is.”
“Do you think you’ll get divorced?” he asks.
She seems to ignore him.
I’m waiting, he’s waiting. There are no dots like with a text when people are writing. We are in a nether world of not knowing if she is writing, waiting, gone elsewhere. We hadn’t noticed that we’d gone below ten thousand feet and the Wi-Fi had dropped. Calls were done. He had no way of knowing. I had no way of knowing.
I am in darkness. The plane is about to land. He’s been cut off, and I’m unalterably severed from his world, my world. The plane screeches down uneventfully, and I stand well before our row was ready to leave, inching my way to the aisle. The man in the window seat is oblivious to my stares, as he is to everybody he leans over and bumps into.
I race past some people as we exit the plane. I can now see his full face, hustling to keep up with his aggressive and athletic stride. I have no luggage but follow him to baggage claim as he waits and resumes the hunt.
My wife has resumed typing to him but I cannot see his phone. I am no longer hidden in the shadows of the eighteenth row. Now I am next to the man from the window seat and he can feel me. I usually alert my wife when I land but I’m afraid, I don’t want another awkward conversation, another argument, another problem. I just want things to be normal again. Like they were before the fights, before the last kid went off to college. I knew I was unhappy, but I didn’t know she was this unhappy.
“I love you,” I type into my text. I forget to say I landed. I search for the emoji, the heart, the smiling guy with the hearts in his eyes, and send it.
She calls.
I’m nervous to pick up, but I do it after the first ring.
“What the hell is this?” she asks.
“What?”
“Do you know the last words you said to me?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Because it wasn’t goodbye when you left, because you didn’t say goodbye,” she screams. “And it wasn’t good-night the night before you left. And then you were gone for three more nights, and there were no words, no emojis, and for sure there were no hearts.”
“I missed you,” I said.
“Fuck you, Jimmy. I’ve missed you for the past two years. Ever since Eden went off to college. Now you miss me? Why?”
It was as if she’d known why I said I missed her, like she knew I’d been looking, watching, over the shoulder of the guy in 17C.
“I’ve been waiting, and you weren’t in the mood to give. All of a sudden you miss me? All of a sudden you love me?”
“I’ll be home soon, we can talk then—” But before I could finish, she hung up. I needed to get home and see her. Did I miss her or was I just mad at the guy in the window seat?
She was right. I haven’t spoken to her in three days. Did I try calling her? I look up and the guy from the window seat is gone. I don’t know where he went, back to his old world. But I can’t get back to mine.
This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 20.
Photo by Firmbee.com
