First Class Love
written by: Milt Mankoff
As an infrequent flyer who has never benefited from a corporate expense account, my airborne experiences have been in economy class. They have also been invariably uneventful. But, at sixty-four, when I made a red-eye excursion to her world in the Pacific Northwest, my bi-coastal girlfriend Rebecca decided to give me a taste of first class, courtesy of her frequent flyer miles.
As I opened the door from the waiting area to begin boarding the plane, I saw a woman thirty feet ahead. She seemed to be asking a flight attendant for guidance in negotiating the labyrinthine tunnel to the aircraft. On the plane, as I placed my carry-on baggage in the overhead compartment, anticipating my delightfully great seat, I noticed that this woman was seated just behind me in the nearly vacant First Class section.
“It was pretty confusing—which way to go—wasn’t it?” I noted in a friendly manner.
“Yes, I felt like an idiot,” she chuckled.
We exchanged a few more banalities in the next minute—the weather forecast being the most compelling topic. Since I usually wait until the plane cruises before opening a magazine or book, I was happy to chat. But my neck felt the strain of the more than ninety-degree turns required for eye contact with my fellow passenger.
“No one is in my row yet. If you want to talk, come sit here,” I said. “Doing this exorcist maneuver with my head isn’t working too well.” But, of course, my intentions were entirely orthopedic, and I imagined no more than a time-killing conversation before some new passenger claimed the seat I offered. Then the woman would return to hers, and I’d open the book I had hoped to finish on the five-hour flight.
She slid into the seat beside me, and we introduced ourselves. Her name was Karen. I hadn’t gotten a good look at her up to this point, but now I could see she was about twenty years my junior, appealingly slim. Her face was attractive and might have been quite beautiful if she hadn’t subscribed to the Tammy Faye Bakker School of Cosmetic Application. This observation would have been irrelevant if, within no more than thirty seconds after exchanging names, Karen didn’t lean into me, resting her shoulder on mine. A moment later, she placed her hand on my arm and said, “I should go put some makeup on. What do you think?”
“Why,” I asked, baffled by her behavior and suggestion.
“Oh, are you one of those men who prefer the natural look?”
The peculiarity of an excessively made-up woman thinking she needed an additional layer suggested she imagined we were on a date of some kind. I chose to play along and said I thought she looked fine as is. Is this what I’d been missing flying coach all these years? Was hiring undercover operatives to seduce lone passengers some desperate ploy by the oft-criticized airline to make their first-class section more desirable?
While I contemplated this possibility, I engaged my olfactory glands to determine whether Karen had been drinking but discerned only the oversweet powdery scent of makeup and perfume. Then, leaning over again, she suddenly placed her mouth on mine and began to kiss me. I was unnerved, excited, and guilty-feeling. But the second response easily trumped the others, so I reciprocated without hesitation.
Rebecca, who would be waiting for me at the end of the flight, would not be amused if she knew what her frequent flyer miles had facilitated. But, I reasoned, I wasn’t just kissing Karen for personal pleasure, but taking a great leap for Mankind. Undoubtedly, I wasn’t the first passenger to end up in a sexual situation with a perfect stranger on an airplane. Still, I couldn’t believe many commenced this activity within less than five minutes of boarding. I felt privileged to be a participant in and an observer of perhaps a historical first.
The kissing was pleasurable enough, and it continued for some time, suspended only when an announcement came to buckle up, put our seats upright, and prepare for takeoff. At this juncture, we lapsed into small talk, an activity that seemed oddly out of place considering what had preceded it.
Karen revealed she had lived on the West Coast before moving to New York twenty years ago, courted by a prestigious modeling agency. Later, she worked for a well-known television producer who, she claimed, had sexually harassed her. She sued and won a significant settlement. This irony was not lost on me since, had I been of a different mindset, namely that of a man incapable of infidelity even under the most compelling circumstances, I could easily accuse her of sexual harassment.
I was not that man.
Karen was now a high-level manager in a health services agency. This trip was to mark the first anniversary of her mother’s death. The visit, she feared, would exacerbate her deep sense of loss. So I expressed sympathy and told her a bit about my work history, avoiding any mention of the purpose of my westward journey.
Perhaps fifteen minutes had passed until we were finally at our cruising altitude. The flight attendants hovered around us, taking drink orders. Karen asked for a pinot grigio while I requested mineral water and a twist of lime in a genuine non-plastic first-class glass.
She calmly sipped her wine. But suddenly, a few minutes later, Karen tried to climb over the immovable armrest separating us onto my lap. “Whoa!” I exclaimed as I restrained her, aware that we were in an aircraft, a fact to which she seemed oblivious. “Do I have to take all my clothes off to get some attention from you?” she declared with some exasperation.
“No. You have my attention. But you can’t just sit on top of me here.”
Headlines flashed before my eyes:
PROF AND EX-MODEL BARRED FROM MILE HIGH CLUB
FIRST-CLASS LOVE
CABIN FEVER
The accompanying articles would detail our arrests for public lewdness and forced resignations from our respective jobs. Then, finally, there was the one hundred percent certainty of my being unceremoniously dumped by an enraged and humiliated Rebecca.
Given her personal history, there was even a chance that Karen herself would throw me under the bus and claim sexual assault, suing the airline and me. And, of course, as a male, any countersuit would turn me into an object of ridicule. After all, would any straight man reject the advances of a femme fatale under such world-historical circumstances? So I had to walk a fine line between satisfying my lust and avoiding a bust.
“OK. I want another drink,” Karen declared, snapping me out of my reverie from the dark side. She was motioning to the ever-helicoptering flight attendant, there even when you didn’t want her.
“I don’t think you should have any more,” I said with barely concealed alarm. As the flight attendant moved closer, I frantically made eye contact, doing my non-verbal utmost to communicate the urgent need to abort any delivery of alcohol. Message received. I tried to change the topic.
“Let’s wait until they serve the meal,” I said, hoping to find a middle ground between compliance and defiance of her will.
“I’m not hungry. Why can’t I have some wine?” Karen retorted.
“I just think it’s better to have some food first.”
I feared Karen was going to become belligerent. Instead, she opted for docility, softening her voice and saying, “I really shouldn’t drink.” Perhaps she had imbibed before the flight. She was relatively tiny, unlikely to weigh a hundred pounds. Even a little alcohol without food might have been sufficient to put her two sheets to the wind.
Dinner arrived. Karen just picked at it, but thankfully she stopped asking for wine. I felt relief. During the next several hours, we groped each other in whatever way was logistically feasible, given the existence of the unforgiving armrest between our seats (unlike in coach, they can’t be raised) and the lack of blankets to obscure what our roaming hands were up to.
“You’d think first class would at least have blankets,” she said with a sly grin. I agreed but felt too self-conscious to ask a flight attendant to rectify the situation, given what I felt was the apparent transparency of the request. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, so we did manage to stack a few small pillows on our respective laps. The padding allowed some furtive unzipping, but there were clear barriers to anything more adventurous, especially the chastity armrest. We became fumbling teenagers, except teenagers no longer fumble.
Eventually, I felt a need to stretch my legs and walk around a bit. I passed one of the flight attendants who remarked jokingly, “You two seem to be having fun.”
“We are,” I replied, “but I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
He was incredulous. He had assumed we were traveling together, a likely misperception since Karen had joined me only a minute after boarding, and we were in take-off mode well before the aircraft joined us. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” he declared, with a look of bemused astonishment, “and I’ve been flying for seven years.”
“To top it off, my girlfriend is picking me up on the other end,” I added, to press upon him the full measure of my dubious achievement.
“You’re joking. More power to you.”
I nodded as if I’d just won Olympic gold for the Transgressathon.
Word spread, and throughout the remainder of the journey, all the flight attendants, male and female, gave me every indication that this knowledge made their otherwise uneventful trip unusually entertaining. Of course, they didn’t express this verbally, but with the excessively amused facial expressions with which they caught my eye. Karen was now napping, her head resting on the infernal armrest.
I eased past Karen’s sleeping figure to go to the bathroom, briefly wondering whether the two of us might fit in there. Could I officially qualify for the Mile High Club? But, seeing that accommodations seemed quite cramped, even for an airplane, I abandoned the idea. An additional and perhaps decisive consideration was my determination to keep Karen safely moored to her seat where she couldn’t get herself (and me) into serious trouble.
When Karen awoke, she seemed lucid. We proceeded to have a more normal conversation. She spoke about the challenges of her job and her dislike for the man she was currently dating, punctuating this commentary by saying, “You have to visit me while you’re out here.” I decided I had to be honest—demi-honest—and informed her that while she was indeed lovely, and this had been great fun, I was visiting my girlfriend.
I adopted a regretful mien. Although she was sweet and sexy, and I was a little curious about her persona on terra firma, I felt we had little in common. Apart from completing what we had just started on the plane, I doubted—even had I not been in a relationship or going to visit Rebecca—that I would have had much of a desire to spend significant time with Karen.
Her response to mentioning my girlfriend was, thankfully, a matter-of-fact “I understand.” Her only additional comment on the subject was to ask whether I would want to if I did not have a girlfriend. I gallantly lied, “Of course.”
My intuition that Karen and I would not be kindred spirits thirty-seven thousand feet below was reinforced several minutes later when, much to my amazement, I noticed a large hardcover copy of the Bible protruding from her handbag. Seeing that I noticed it, she said, “It’s been very comforting to me after the loss of my mom. I read it every day and go to Bible study at a church on the Upper West Side every week, or try to.” I felt like I’d just hit the Daily Double in the Weirdness Derby. Not only had I never had any form of sex—or pre-sex, or whatever you want to call it—with a stranger on a plane before, but I had never known anyone who read the Bible, except as literature. So that one woman provided both novelties was something to savor.
Karen never did open the Bible during our flight. Instead, she focused on maximizing sexual, not spiritual, arousal. We spent the remainder of our airborne time furtively exploring whatever of each other’s body parts we could manage to touch with our fingers. Finally, we landed. Before leaving the passengers-only area, we made a futile attempt to find some location where we could achieve some privacy for some last mutual molestation. Alas, both interior design and ever-present humanity squelched our modest ambition. After a brief time, we surrendered to the inevitable, laughed, kissed goodbye, good luck, and discreetly and separately, exited.
Rebecca was waiting for me. We embraced as we had on many occasions after being apart and reuniting. Never a night owl, I was particularly exhausted from the lengthy flight, especially since it was five a.m. for me. We drove to her apartment and got into bed almost immediately. Despite my fatigue, we made love far more passionately than I would have imagined possible. I had a vast reservoir of unrequited desire. Rebecca, I rationalized, was at least getting some indirect benefit from my infidelity.
But I was hardly about to mention that. Someday I vowed to tell Rebecca the tale. Her initial reaction would probably be anger. But I believed she would transcend that state and appreciate that what transpired on that flight was one of those rare moments when one must say “yes” to a sui generis experience having no more significant meaning apart from the unlikely fact that it happened. I knew I could have handled the situation without resentment had the situation been reversed.
Several months later, I did tell Rebecca about that red-eye. My guilt had become too great, though not about what happened. Rather, withholding such a juicy story from her while disclosing it to a handful of close friends. Her initial burst of anger subsided only to reignite shortly after at the thought others within our circle knew, and she alone had been in the dark.
After I presented my defense, she acknowledged amazement and considerable envy. She forgave me. Her final word on the matter, however, was, “From now on, you ride … coach.”
- First Class Love - July 28, 2024
