These Dreams of You

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Zan never has picked a political argument with a stranger before. Actually he doesn’t pick political arguments with anyone; he’s so averse to confrontation that when people talk politics, he’s as likely to sink into even greater silences. It’s hard to tell what age the woman is. She could be an older-looking thirty-eight or a younger-looking fifty-one. She looks older than Viv, who looks ten years younger than she is.

The woman is wearing a new ring that she’s shown off to the flight attendants. Zan decides she’s just gotten engaged — maybe, to put it cruelly, in the nick of time. He isn’t sure what leads the woman to draw conclusions about Zan’s political views, which are less predictable than the woman assumes; maybe it’s something she’s seen Zan reading on his laptop. Later he’ll wonder — though this might be unfair — if she saw Zan with his black daughter. In any case she immediately means to straighten him out on some things. After some back and forth that Zan wants no part of, she blurts, “The big difference between us is that I believe in personal responsibility and you don’t.”

He says in disbelief, “I don’t?” He looks back to his wife’s seat to see if she’s catching any of this, but Viv sleeps. Zan doesn’t understand Viv’s sleeping habits, how the slightest thing at home keeps her awake but she can sleep upright on a plane in a seat smaller than a coffin. “No,” the woman says emphatically, and Zan, visions of foreclosure in his head, wonders if she’s right. But she doesn’t know me, he thinks, doesn’t know my life; in fact — and there it is right on the edge of his brain — if she’s just getting engaged then in all likelihood she doesn’t have kids, and he hears himself snarling at her, “Do you even have kids? and if you don’t, then you have no clue what responsibility is.” Finally having gotten some guy to give her a ring, her chance of having children now, at either thirty-eight or fifty-one, is as far from her as the ground below them is now; and she looks stricken, her sense of power suddenly shattered, and bursts into tears. .

Except she doesn’t, “because,” Zan later relates to Viv, “I didn’t say that. It was there on the edge of my brain and there it stayed, because as much as I would have liked to let her have it, with her I’m-all-about-personal-responsibility-and-you-aren’t, as much as she asked for it, as much as she deserved it—”

“—you couldn’t bring yourself to,” says Viv.

He knows it’s the way a woman can be most profoundly hurt, “and maybe that’s my fucking problem,” he mutters, more to himself, maybe it’s the problem with all of us (whoever we are) when it comes to dealing with them (whoever. .), a softness, no killer instinct, mush for fortitude. “She didn’t have any problem telling me I have no sense of responsibility.”

“I know,” Viv says, and takes his hand.