Foreign Affairs Read Free Page B

meeting someone interesting—and after all, whom even among her friends would she want to converse with for so long?
    Besides, this man looks like someone Vinnie would hardly want to converse with for seven-and-a-half minutes. His dress and speech proclaim him to be, probably, a Southern Plains States businessman of no particular education or distinction; the sort of person who goes on package tours to Europe. And indeed the carry-on bag that rests between his oversize Western-style leather boots is pasted with the same SUN TOURS logo she had noticed earlier: fat comic-book letters enclosing a grinning Disney sun. Physically too he is of a type she has never cared for: big, ruddy, blunt-featured, with cropped coarse graying red hair. Some women would consider him attractive in a weather-beaten Western way; but Vinnie has always preferred in men an elegant slimness, fair fine hair and skin, small well-cut features—the sort of looks that are an idealized male version of her own.
    Half an hour later, as she refolds the Times and gets out a novel, she glances again at her companion. He is wedged heavily in his seat, neither dozing nor reading, although the airline magazine lies limp on his broad knees. For a moment she speculates as to what sort of man would embark on a transatlantic flight without reading materials, categorizing him as philistine and as improvident. It was foolish of him to count on passing the time in conversation: even if he didn’t happen to be seated beside someone like Vinnie, he might well have been placed next to foreigners or children. What will he do now, just sit there?
    As the plane drones on, Vinnie’s question is answered. At intervals her seatmate gets up and walks toward the rear, returning each time smelling unpleasantly of burnt tobacco. Vinnie, who detests cigarettes, wonders irritably why he didn’t request a seat in the smoking section. He rents headphones from the stewardess, fits the plastic pieces into his large red ears, and listens to the low-grade recorded noise—evidently without satisfaction, since he keeps switching channels. Finally he rises again and, standing in the aisle, converses with a member of his tour group in the seat ahead, and then for even longer with two others in the seats behind. Vinnie realizes that she is surrounded by Sun Tourists, the representatives of all she deplores and despises in her native land and is going to London to get away from.
    Though she has no wish to eavesdrop, she cannot avoid hearing them complain in loud drawling guffawing Western voices about their delayed departure, the lack of movies on this flight, and the real bum steer given to them in this matter by their travel agent. As this phrase is repeated, Vinnie visualizes the Real Bum Steer as a passenger on the plane. Scrawny, swaybacked, probably lamed, it stands on three legs in the aisle with a SUN TOURS label glued on its scruffy brown haunch.
    Unable to concentrate on her novel while the conversation continues, Vinnie gets up and walks toward the rear. She finds a washroom that looks reasonably clean and wipes the seat, first with a wet, then with a dry paper towel. Before leaving, she removes the plastic containers of Blue Grass cologne, skin freshener, and moisturizer from their rack and places them in her handbag, as is her custom. As is her custom, she tells herself that British Airways and Elizabeth Arden expect, perhaps even hope, that some passenger will appropriate these products; that they are offered to the public as a form of advertising.
    This kind of confiscation—borrowing, some might call it, though nothing of course is ever returned—is habitual with Professor Miner. Stores are out of bounds—she is no common shoplifter, after all—and the possessions of her acquaintances are usually safe, though you must be careful when lending her your pen, particularly if it has an extra-fine point; she is apt to return it absent-mindedly to her own purse. But planes,