I could spend days at airports, just observing people and then writing about them, making up stories. When I was little my parents told me that I should not make up stories about people based on how they looked or behaved – so when I first started to violate this rule that parent tape went off in my head and I felt guilty. I was travelling at the time with my colleague Michael who was my first mentor in organizational behavior. He died many years ago and my big regret is that I never thanked him for the important role he played in my professional life. We travelled together to Lesotho and spent hours in the Lesotho Sun’s restaurant spinning stories about our fellow hotel guests. We would make up such outrageous stories that we’d have tears running down our cheeks from laughter. It felt so naughty to do that and yet it was so much fun.
Now I am spinning these stories on my own but I am always thinking of Michael when I do this. It’s much more fun to do with someone else. Here are some made up stories about the people who crossed my pass in Schiphol’s KLM lounge.
There is an intriguing couple entering the lounge just in front of me. He’s British, pink skinned and ugly. I rarely use that adjective to describe a person but it fits him. He is in his sixties and has drunk too much all his life (it’s that red dimpled nose and the blotchy face). He’s also been out in the sun most of his life and his skin is wrinkled like a prune. The skin on his face lies in thick folds over his skull, I’ve never quite seen anyone like it, that’s why he features in the first story. She, by contrast, is young, black and beautiful, probably in her late twenties. I wonder, what’s the attraction? A ticket out of poverty? Money? Love? Sex? (The latter is hard to imagine, I shudder). I imagine they met at a bar in some provincial capital in Africa, where there is not much to do other than work, drink and dance (a Bend-in-the-river kind of place). He told her stories about his homeland and she was looking for a way out of early marriage and dreading to become like her unhappy mother. Maybe he deals in diamonds. He’s going to introduce her to his relatives in the UK.
Another couple walks in; they are in their late sixties, maybe seventies. He’s rather nondescript but she is a striking presence; maybe because she is very tall, taller than her already tall husband. I guess they come from Minnesota. She wears a man’s shirt several sizes too big and pants that are held with a ropey belt over her hipbones that jut out visibly. She looks fragile and worried; her body looks tired and used up. I wonder what her story is – sick? Dying? I imagine that her husband is taking her on a trip around the world. But she is paying for it because she worked as a lawyer until she got sick and invested her earnings wisely. He was a country doctor but cannot afford the liability insurance anymore and quit; the timing was right and he became her caretaker. Since she is dying they have decided to use up their money in this one final trip with stops in all the places she has dreamed about while she was still healthy and working all the time. I hope they make it and wish them Godspeed. But then I find out they are both members of the Hemlock Society and have a plan in case they survive the trip. This is unlikely since they also have a plan not to. They make a handsome couple, despite her protruding bones.
Across the lounge is another couple that draws my attention. She is talking incessantly and loudly on her cell phone so we can all follow the conversation. This is how I find out she is Dutch. She has a Hermes scarf draped with calculated nonchalance over her shoulders. I can tell from the way she dresses and the blond hair that she spends a fortune on beauty but she can’t hide that she is aging, in her early fifties maybe. I don’t know if her husband is Dutch because he never opens his mouth. He looks like he could be her father but somehow I know he is not. He comes from a long line of patricians, with lots of money and style that doesn’t need to be bought as it comes with the genes. They always travel first class, or business if there is nothing higher. That’s why they are in the lounge. She’s at home here. I wonder again about the attraction (the possibilities are always the same). Something keeps them tied together until death (looking at him this maybe soon). Maybe she is speeding things up by slowly poisoning him, adding one small pill to his already full pillbox, every day. He is too smart for her and has of course noticed it but he keeps quiet because he doesn’t want to make trouble (his kind of people don’t do that). He has been putting the pills in the big spider plant by the window of their (his) old family mansion on a canal in Amsterdam – the plant is slowly dying. He is not surprised of course and she doesn’t notice. He is celebrating another birthday next month. They are travelling to Peru.
A young girl who looks like one of those Eastern European gymnasts who dominate the Olympics sits with an older man. He can’t be her dad because they don’t look at all like each other. And since I don’t expect kidnappers to sit in frequent flyer lounges he must be her gymnastics coach. He has the body of an athlete, well built, muscular with short blond hair, a grown up version of the archetypal Hitler youth, only the red kerchief is missing. I guess they are on their way home from a gymnastic event and she did not do well which is why they are not talking much together. She has disappointed him (and he her I suppose). She knows it and sits with her knees drawn to her chest, listening to the music on her nano, wondering how she is going to handle the disappointment from her mom and dad in Belorus, who have sacrificed everything for her success and will know by tonight that all was for naught. She will pick up the violin next, find a Chinese teacher and try to become a champion that way. Her coach will find another promising young thing and try again.
An older gay couple, Dutch men, sit a little ways off discussing the upcoming retirement of one of them. I imagine that they are struggling with the notion of getting old and no longer being the studs they once were but they are deeply in love, I can tell from the way they smile at each other. They could be holding hands but may be they think they are too old for that. They are off to Venice to celebrate their anniversary. They met there ages ago when they were young and randy.
Axel and I held hands in the restaurant at Logan. I wonder whether we show up in someone else’s fantasy. It’s a nice idea – older couple, deeply in love, saying goodbye for awhile. I like that story, and it’s true.
Sylvia's Journal 
Recent Comments