Though not overly fond of long-haul airline conversation – seven hours is a lot of small talk with a stranger - I do like to exchange a few words with the person I’m sitting next to on the basis that if the plane drops out of the sky this is who I’m going to plunge to eternity with; and if there’s an after life, we might be stuck together in the waiting room for quite some time.Then there’s the question of sleeping. Though I can’t actually ‘sleep’ with the man I am sleeping with, I can happily nod off beside two hundred total strangers in the other mile high club. Indeed in the last year I’ve slept with a great deal of men, and even a few women, which considering how darn uncomfortable it is to sleep on a plane, even in business class, is surprising. Especially when the guy in front of you is often comatose with his head practically in your lap, and your own head is equally close to those parts of the bloke behind that you don’t usually get introduced to on such short acquaintance. In steerage you're touching thighs and arms with the people on either side of you and your face is inches away from theirs. If the engine dropped below a roar you would hear them breathe. Intimate it most certainly is.
For someone who, when nervous, doesn’t even like eating on a first date, put me on a plane with a little fold out table next to someone whose name I don’t even know, and despite being marginally afraid of flying (and blindly, freaking terrified of turbulence) I’m as comfortable as if sitting on the sofa with my supper on a tray. I’ll even ask for extra bread while, when on a date, I don’t dare eat, and when I travel with my kids I eat all theirs too.
I don’t quite understand how my intimacy issues work when I am filled with an overwhelming desire to get in my car and drive home in the middle of the night when curled up horizontally beside a person I really like (odder still when you remember that the car is parked a hundred miles away outside my house); and yet stick me in the sky in a metal cigar with a cross section of sweating, cross, often very strange, humanity, and after one mini bottle of wine, I’m flat on my back (or the 95 degrees that pass for reclining in economy) supine, somnolent and – yes, let’s face it, probably snoring.
So, I turned left this time and I’m sitting semi-prone with my feet up, next to Dorie who has tiny crinkly blue eyes inserted like push pins into his face, a sparse fluff of greying hair stuck on to his head the way kids stick cotton wool on to table tennis balls for a craft program, and a very red nose. He’s Ukranian, he tells me and has lived all over the world. In fact elsewhere he describes himself as an Israeli, I discover when I Google him (oh yes Lady from The Cotswold-London line, you are not the only person who can look up people on the internet) who left the Ukraine when he was two and who has been a cowboy, running a cattle farm in Wyoming for the last fifteen years.
He’s also an anthropologist, he says. He used to teach many years ago but he got fed up with students who weren’t interested in the subject. ‘To tell the truth there isn’t much difference between driving cattle and teaching, both times you are looking at the same thing,’ and he stares blankly at me and chews open mouthed.
I laugh.
He tells me he doesn’t think much of the Ukranians, or the ‘Bella Russians or any of those folks over there. How can you live for all that time and do nothing to free yourself?’
I venture ‘fear, tyranny, oppression, salt mines, etc’ as some contributing factors, but he isn’t buying it. He is, I discover, over several sparse conversations in the succeeding hours, a hard task master. He’s dogmatic with his students, dogmatic with the people who come on vacation to his ranch, dogmatic with his kids. He’s the man with all the answers.
I’m wondering how an anthropology professor gets the dosh to buy a huge cattle rang in Wyoming and who runs his own plane, travels business class, and takes his vacations in places as diverse as Borneo and Madagascar. His son is currently doing his junior year ‘on board’ instead of abroad, by which he and his fellow students live on a cruise ship and travel round the Mediterranean having classes and visiting ports along the way.
I tell him my daughter spent some time teaching in the South Pacific thinking that this might interest the anthropologist in him, as he went up the Amazon last year ‘for the tribes’ and had just visited the head hunters in Borneo (where no doubt he had opinions on the best way to decapitate that he was eager to share), but he blanks me and continues to tell me about his son being smart, and really liking Scottish and Irish girls, and always having one or the other on his arm while he’s been in London.
I don’t know if he’s realised I’m Scottish, but I don’t want to point it out in case he thinks I’m auditioning for the cute Scottish arm candy part in the post 50 matron category.
‘You should get yourself an American man and go out west,’ he tells me. ‘Just rent a car and drive.’ I point out that even men who don’t come from America can drive. ‘Yeah, yeah, but better an American as they will have a feel for the place. Or an Italian. Get yourself an Italian and just don’t let him drive too fast.’
I refrain for mentioning my Italian misery man because he’s not really responding to anything I say, just talking at me, as though I’m one of the bovine cud-chewing students he used to teach, laying it down, the world as it is according to Dorie.
‘I always tell my students…. I always tell the guys who come to my ranch… I always tell my kids… I always tell people…’ Always telling.
There’s a horrible patch of turbulence that makes me clutch the arm of my chair thinking that if the plane goes down and I’m sitting in the holding lounge for hell with this chap then I’m going to be well and truly told by the time I fry. One of the pilots is lounging against the bathroom door chatting, so I'm guessing we're not for the chip pan quite yet.
The flight attendant takes away the remains of my shrimp risotto then comes round with another bottle of wine and fills our glasses. We have cheese and crackers, followed by ice cream sundaes from the trolley. I’ve eaten more today that I have in a week.
We sleep. He snores. I snuggle up with my legs to my chest and my backside, inadequately covered by the blanket, almost in his face, and drift off half way through the second Rom Com. If he put his arm around my waist I don’t think I would even flinch.
It’s round two. I think we’re over Canada somewhere but I can’t see through the cloud landscape of flat Dutch fields which have the layered texture of coconut fudge when you’ve boiled it just a minute or so too long and poured it out into a tray.
The flight attendant offers me a cookie and I accept it without question like a foie gras goose.
Dorie continues with his Seinfeld marathon, and I resume Confessions of a Shopaholic (I really have no standards when I get on a plane. One man I know says he looks around and evaluates the women he would like to sleep with in the non sleepy way but if my taste in films and enjoyment of economy food in foil trays had anything to do with it, it’s as well I don’t think along those lines. Dorie, however, it has to be said, would not be a contender. His belly sways like a fattened steer and he smells pungently of BO. Even five or so hours into the flight, I can still detect the not so fresh smell of sweat every time he moves his arm, which he does often, to drive home those points he keeps on making. Perhaps cowboys don’t wear deodorant? Perhaps it’s not manly to sit and talk the ears off head hunters when you’ve first applied Right Guard?
He starts telling me about his daughter’s back surgery. And then about his wife's trip to Miami. And then he expounds his theory on multi-culturalism in Britain which is an explosion waiting to happen, he insists. ‘Not even in America are there so many different races, and we’re an immigrant society. You’re going to have big, big problems.’ He mutters darkly. His next topic is Middle East Politics. He tells me all about Camp David and what Arafat was offered and did and didn’t settle for. My ex was there and the two accounts don’t match. I mention this, expecting maybe some interest. None. Dorie knows better. He knows there are no such things as Palestinians and that the original Philistines came from central Europe and had red hair, and that all those people in that area came from Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and that none of those people ‘over there’ belong there. The Iraqis aren’t Babylonians and the Palestinians aren’t Palestinians and the Syrians aren’t Assyrian and the Iranians aren’t Persians.
‘So what, they’re all immigrants, then, like America, what does it matter if they belong there? They live there now.’
‘Yes, I tell my students not to look behind them, but to look forward, to move on.’
I’m rather longingly hoping to move on to the last half an hour of Shopaholic. I may have drunk more than I thought as I find myself slightly misty eyed at the end.
We have tea and a sandwich. More turbulence follows which makes it impossible to concentrate on anything. Dorie resumes his treatise on the Middle East, moving on now to the veil and the hirsuteness of Middle Eastern women. 'Those women are hairy. So are the Spaniards and Italians. It's like their eyebrows have fallen on to their top lip'.
And a gentleman too...
He once travelled on a plane with a lot of women who arrived wearing the full black chador, then went into the bathroom and came out wearing normal clothes and all ordered a drink.
‘We had quite a good discussion about it. I got talking to her and all her friends. I can’t help it. I always talk to people. I like to find out about them. It’s the anthropologist in me,’ he says.
I tell him that I write and that I too like hearing people’s stories but he merely nods.
Only when we land in Newark does he turn to me and tell me he’s called Dorie (though I’d already seen his non abbreviated name on his customs declaration).
‘And you are?’ He asks.
‘Marion,’ I say.
And I realise that this has been the one single personal question he has asked me in seven hours fifteen minutes together and the sum total of his anthropological interest in me – the man I slept with on the way to America - my one night stand.
