Paula Leyba

story about a chance encounter

She was in front of him, waiting in line at the gate for the flight from San Jose to Dallas. The problem was, she was trembling.

           “Are you alright?”

           “I’m really scared. I’ve never been on a plane before.”

           She spoke between clenched teeth, like someone freezing who can barely get the words out.

           “It’s not so bad. The windows are small and you can't really see out.”

           She nodded, as if comforted.

           He realized that his words had not registered, and he wanted to help. She was a young Hispanic woman with black crinkly hair wearing a red dress that was more suited to a party than a plane.

           “You know,” he said in as gentle a voice as possible, “you’re in much greater danger on the freeway than in a plane."

           When they boarded the plane, their seats were mid-section; he saw that she was on the other side and one aisle down. The elderly man next to him complained that the airline had messed up his tickets; his wife was two rows back. A mild “would you be willing to switch seats so this gentleman can be next to his wife?” followed by a little switching among three humans and it was done. The elderly man was sitting with his elderly wife and he was sitting next to the woman who had never flown before.

           He saw that she was genuinely terrified, and to take her mind off it, asked where she was going.

           “Memphis. I have to pick up my stepson. I guess I have to change planes in Dallas.”

           “Let me see your ticket.” He looked at it and explained about getting off, going to the next gate, and catching the flight to Memphis.

           “It’s almost a two hour wait. I’m going to Norfolk so I have about the same wait you do.”

           He told a couple of jokes, to distract her. The plane took off. She was shaking, and he held her hand.

 

 

“You know,” he had said, “you are in much greater danger on the freeway than in a plane."

           She was not comforted by his observation �" it was such a cliché �" but she was touched that he resorted to it. She looked at him: tall with thinning blond hair, a bit on the heavy side, thick glasses: not slick enough to be a lawyer. Maybe in computers.

           When he took her hand, she was startled at how large his hands were, but she was too frightened of flying to be afraid of him.

           With nothing to lose, she told him the stark truth without embellishment or self-pity. Her name was Paula Dalton; her father’s name was Leyba, he was Mexican and her mother was half-Anglo, half Muwekma Indian. She had three children, plus an adopted son and a stepson. She was twenty-eight and trying to get to twenty-nine.

           “Trying to get to twenty-nine! I like that,” he said, chuckling.

           “I have advanced leukemia.”

           She said it calmly, and having said it, she wondered why she was so afraid of being on the plane. The thought brought the smallest of smiles, and she glanced at him. It seemed he had noticed her smile and now he had the slightest of one himself, as if they had shared an old familiar joke. That made her laugh.

           “What are you laughing at?” he asked, close to a laugh himself.

           “I don’t know!”

 

 

He told her his name; he was raised in Belmonte, California, gone to college in San Luis Obispo, now lived in Norfolk, Virginia, was married and they had two children �" a boy who was seventeen, a girl thirteen. The four of them had been on vacation is San Francisco. He was flying back to return to work; his wife and kids would fly back in a week. During their vacation, he and his wife had decided to separate.

           “A trial separation,” he explained.

           His marriage was the last thing he wanted to talk about. He told her about inheriting a ton of money, blowing it all on a movie theater and bar and a vineyard, drifting into the insurance business. His hearing was shot and he was going to get hearing aids pretty soon, and the wall of his aorta had a thin spot, not life threatening but something to keep an eye on.

           He didn’t mention that last item, feeling it would sound like he was competing with her illness.

 

 

He needn’t have worried; she didn’t want to hear about his marriage. She didn’t show any interest in it or in his children or in his work in an insurance company. She was centered in the perplexity of her life and how it had evolved to this point.

           “My father went back to Mexico; my mother quickly drank herself to death, so when I was twelve I was put in a Catholic orphanage. It wasn’t so bad but I hated it. A rich Anglo came and bought me when I was sixteen. They don’t call it that of course; he had a wife and kids, but that is what it amounted to. It turned out they had been married in Latvia or something, she herself had been bought out of an orphanage there; I don’t know. All I know is soon it was just him and me. And he wasn’t rich at all. He was a federal courier or something like that, I never quite understood what he did. I married him and we had two children. When he divorced me, it was because he was too old. That is what he said, ‘I'm too old.’ Maybe it was time to go looking for another orphan.

           “I married a Latino man, you know, a Mexican but raised in the U.S. We had a daughter. He was lazy but he was wonderful with the children, even the two who weren’t his. I worked hard. I bought a house for me and the kids. He took off as soon as he heard about the cancer.”

           She told this story in a quiet, nearly flat way, for she did not want his pity. But she saw, felt really, him recoil from her, and then, in almost an automatic reaction, a flash of skepticism crossed his face. The fear of flying, the orphanage, the old pedophile, the cancer, the cowardly husband �" did he think that she was lying, or that she was a professional victim? It made her sad. It made her angry. On impulse, she pulled her sleeve up and thrust her arm at him. Well, that would settle it. She took one final look at him. He was handsome in a fleshy way, sure of himself but not cocky, semi-educated and semi-articulate; in other words, a typical middle-class American male.

           She realized that she was no longer trembling. She had forgotten about being in a plane.

 

 

He looked at her arm, saw the burns from treatment, understood that she had seen his skepticism, understood that she was dying from leukemia. He had heard her say it; it had registered; but he had not felt it.

           It rose in him with overpowering force, a feeling that he had not had for over twenty years, one that certain types of young men feel �" a rush of compassion marred by lust.

           The plane was approaching Dallas. They were being told to buckle up and return their seats to an upright position.

 

 

After getting off the plane and finding the gates to their next flights, they had over an hour. He ordered a coffee, she a rum and coke. They sat opposite each other at a small table in the lounge and he could see her face from the front: half Indian, half Latino features, her hair as black and crinkly as her dress was red and crinkly. She was definitely his type, a young dark-skinned woman from the wrong side of the tracks. But he wasn’t feeling seductive at all; he was caught up in her story and her face, and felt elated and miserable, elated at feeling anything at all after sixteen years of marriage, miserable over her misfortune as well as the break-up of his family.

           “My brother died two years ago of cancer,” she said. “It wasn’t what I have but something else. I really loved him but he became distant at the end, it was like he wasn’t even himself at all. I didn’t even go to his funeral.”

           She noticed again his hands, which were thrust in front like the paws of a dog. His hands were immense, and the veins stuck up from under the skin. She raised her eyes to his face, and was startled to see that he was looking at her; he was looking at her and seeing her �" she knew she was being seen.

           “You are a strange man,” she said.

           “I am a strange man,” he said, and at that moment, believed it.

           “Why do you look at me that way?”

           “You know.”

           “You don’t have to feel sorry for me.”

           “I don’t feel sorry for you.”

           It was time for her plane. He wrote his address and phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to her. She wrote down her address. She didn’t have a phone, so she wrote her aunt’s phone number.

           “But don’t call me there unless you have to.”

           He walked her to the gate and they stood standing off to the side.

           “I will never lie to you,” she said.

           “No, let’s never lie to each other.”

           They kissed briefly, like a married couple.

           “I could come to San Jose in August if you want,” he said.

           “I’d like that. If I’m still alive.”

 

 

On the plane to Memphis, she kicked herself. She couldn’t believe she had said, “If I’m still alive.” That was the kind of self-pity she was determined to avoid. She couldn’t help feeling it but she didn’t want to display it.

           She thought: how typical, my first time out of California and I pick up an older Anglo man. I must be looking for a father. It makes sense; I didn’t have one, but I don’t have to keep doing it over and over.

           She had made it worse. She had said, “someone will let you know when I die.” She said it low and she didn’t know if he had heard. He didn’t respond, which was just as well.

           She knew she had gone on too much about her own problems, but he was so nice and also, she had felt some heat coming from him. It made her wince, to think of him touching her. It would be grotesque, to be in bed with him. Yet she thought he could actually handle it. He was clearly good. She wondered about his wife and his marriage and wished he had talked more about that. She knew he was much more broken up about the separation than he realized. She smiled at the clumsy way he had tried to tell jokes, to take her mind off the plane. The real joke was, she was more afraid of flying than of dying.

           She had actually spared him some of the details. They said that they would soon have to amputate one of her feet. The nuns called that a lie of omission but she didn’t think that was the kind of omission they had had in mind.

 

 

The flight to Norfolk was delayed. By the time he boarded he had calmed down slightly but he was still in a heightened state. He imagined a romance. It would be a sort of rescue, although he was not delusional: he didn’t think that he could cure her disease or delay her death.

           The plane hit rough weather over Tennessee and they had to buckle up. He had no fear of flying. He figured that if he was fated to die in a plane crash, he would, but it didn’t seem likely. He remembered telling her that more people die on highways every year than in planes. It made him smile. What a pick-up line.

           Descending into Norfolk, he wondered if it would be too bloodless of him to write down what he remembered of her. He dug out some paper and a pen. He tried to picture her: sculptured face slightly coarsened by life, by fear. A woman’s body that the red dress did nothing to attract attention to. He wrote: Left-handed. Has a pearl ring on her wedding finger. Her first name is Paula and her middle name is Rosemarie. Her bones are thin and fragile.

           He wasn’t sure that last part was true. She looked normal enough, except for the burn marks.

           She hates Latino men, he wrote. At least that is what she said. “I hate Latino men,” she said with dismissive disgust.

           He wrote: “Someone will tell you when I die.”

           At least he thought that is what she said. She had said it quietly and he was hard of hearing in his left ear; he wasn’t sure if that is what she said. And not being sure, he hadn’t responded.

 

 

Her stepson met her at the Memphis airport; the next day the two of them flew to San Jose. She was nervous, but not frightened the way she had been on the flights out. She kept recalling the Anglo guy with thick glasses, and how he had looked at her with feeling, a feeling that was love. She knew it was love but didn’t know how she knew. It was connected to his hands.

           She went back into treatment although that was not going to solve anything, signed papers, talked to her aunt about taking the children.

           She got a note from him, wondering why she hadn’t responded to his letter. But she hadn’t gotten a letter from him. He wrote that if she wanted him to stop writing to her, she should say so.

           She phoned him from a friend’s house. She said she had not gotten the letter but did get the note. She had celebrated her birthday with her three kids and her aunt. She had expected him to call on her birthday.

           “I didn’t know it was your birthday,” he said, sounding confused. “Did you tell me it was your birthday?”

           There was a long awkward pause.

           “I knew you were twenty-eight,” he said defensively.

           “They amputated my foot,” she said. She said it the same way she had said she had advanced leukemia on the plane, with dignity.

           He could not think of anything to say.

           She said her new goal was August.

           She wrote him, telling him about her stepson Alfredo, how the jack holding up the old truck had slipped and crushed his ankle, how she would like for him to visit her in San Jose, but she thought August would be too late. Could he come now? And if that wasn’t possible, could she come there? She hadn’t really caught where it was he lived but she could fly there. She wasn’t afraid of flying anymore.

           She just wanted to see him. She wanted him to look at her again the way he had.

 

 

He wished he had a photo of her, because he couldn’t remember what she looked like. His impression was, a sad young woman with quite a pretty face, but he knew that was an after-image replacing the real person. She had crinkly black hair. Why crinkly? Indians have straight hair. Was she part black too and had not mentioned that? And the red dress, with a corrugated surface, a odd choice for a plane trip, more suited to a party.

           He was forty-eight years old and thought he knew what had happened. The sight of a pretty Latina at the gate had caught his eye and triggered his interest, which is to say his lust. If he had been a cave man, he would have gone over and clubbed her to the ground. That’s how the cartoons of cavemen told it. But she had been frightened, frightened of being up in the sky, and that had awakened compassion. That other caveman, in cartoons, the one walking into the cave to the female and their offspring, with a carcass over his shoulder, that was him too, the provider, the protector.

           Lust, compassion �" then the news of the orphanage and leukemia �" these added the final ingredient, which is pity. Pity for her as a human being. It was a fatal combination and had caused him to look at her with love.

 

 

They amputated her foot. By the time they got around to it, it didn’t seem to be a big deal. They had been talking about it so long and now she was glad it was over.  She was in a wheelchair and could stop pretending to live a normal life. The flight to Memphis seemed a long time ago and she didn’t have the strength to write to him. She spent more and more time in front of the TV watching old black and white movies, the women breathing heavily, their arms waving in the air as they spoke; the men tall and composed, at least on the exterior, with cocktails in their hands. Both the men and the women smoked nonstop.

           She felt foolish, inviting herself to come see him. He had evaded the offer. She remembered him as kind, a warm person, and realized that she had invented the romance part and the sex part. He didn’t love her. Had he said he loved her? She couldn’t remember. It seemed he had but now she wasn’t sure. Maybe he had only looked at her with love. And that, she thought with shame, had not been love but pity.

 

 

Being the low man in the company, he found he got assigned mostly grunt work. Five weeks went by and he considered quitting. Furthermore he was miserable without his wife and children. He made two decisions: to stay at his job and to move back in with his wife. She was as relieved as he was.

           He felt guilty about Paula Leyba. What had she said. “Don’t use my aunt’s number unless you have to.” Or something like that. He wondered why he hadn’t asked her why.

           He phoned the number, but got a disconnect message. He wrote her, saying that he had returned to his wife and children, but he didn’t hear from her again.