“I come to this as a consumer,” I say. “A passenger. I appreciate your spirit, but frankly I feel like you’re toying with people’s lives here. An aircraft is not a glass beaker.”
“The world’s a beaker. This is axiomatic in our field.”
“Churches? Are churches beakers?”
Pinter glares. I’ve violated the code of our profession by invoking the sacred. I’m out of bounds.
“You’re religious?” he says.
“Not conventionally.”
“Of course not. No one’s conventionally anything anymore. But do you believe in the image of God in man?”
“I see where you’re going with this. I slipped. I’m sorry. I’ve been surrounded by Mormons for a decade.”
“It’s leaching in. You insulted me,” he says. “You implied I’m corrupt. A Faustian. Untrue. Helping this little airline find an edge in an increasingly cutthroat industry offends not a single commandment, that I’m aware of. In truth, it’s a moral act
“I repeat my apology.”
Pinter sighs, gets up. The difference in his stature sitting and standing is remarkably slight. He’s all torso and no legs, though his long baggy jacket conceals the fact. We face each other. He addresses my chest, as if we’re the same height, and in my weakness I play along—I crouch.
“Margaret and I have been cooking. A request: none of your God talk at supper. And no business.”
“You do understand why I’ve come, I hope. My concept?”
“Afterwards. At the table we stay ‘on topic.’ ”
“And what’s the topic?”
“That’s up to you. The guest.”
“I’ve taken your classes. I want to thank you for them. You were on satellite. You couldn’t see me.”
“That’s an assumption you have no basis for.”
“I know how satellites work.”
“The old ones, maybe.”
Because the street-side entrance to his house is blocked by landscapers and mounds of earth and because the front porch has been removed, leaving the doorway suspended in a wall, Pinter parks his new German sports coupe in an alley. It’s been a long ride. Ontario has traffic, uniformly frantic in all directions, like a stepped-on anthill, and Pinter has no business being out in it. His driving style combines inattention to others with a deep absorption in his own car. Even while cruising, he fussed with the controls, tilting the wheel and pumping up the lumbar and adjusting the louvered vents of the AC. He’ll die in that car, and I suspect he knows it, which is why he’s so eager to enjoy its gimmicks.
Margaret stands on a step by the back door holding an old-style cocktail with a cherry in it. She looks like a girl in her twenties who’s been aged by an amateur movie makeup artist using spirit gum for wrinkles and sprinkled baby powder to gray her hair. She greets me too kindly, kissing both my cheeks, yet barely acknowledges her co- domestic, who knifes past her into the kitchen and pours two drinks. The kitchen is one of the two inhabitable rooms, the other being a bedroom whose door is open, through which I can see a massive four-poster bed dressed with paisley sheets and furry blankets like the type you once saw on water beds. Access to the remainder of the house is blocked by thumbtacked sheets of dusty plastic. Behind them, a shadowy carpenter fires off bursts from a pneumatic nail gun. The noise is piercing.
“Sandy tells me you live in Colorado, out on the frontier.”
“I used to live there. I had an apartment, that is. I gave it up.”
“Where do you live now?”
“Just here and there.”
“Literally?”
“People do it. And not a few.”
“So this is a trend?”
“Not yet. You’ll see it soon, though.”
A drink is placed in my hand. It’s sweet and strong and tastes of 1940s Hollywood. Pinter lights another cigarette and resumes his peculiar smoking trance while peppery Margaret continues with the questions, timing her words to avoid the nail gun’s volleys. Over the royal bed I glimpse a picture: some mythical scene of a semi-naked virgin being chased through a dappled glade by randy goat-men.
The table is set, but I detect no cooking odors. Pinter wraps an apron around his waist and opens a curvy vintage refrigerator packed solid with convenience food. His cigarette smoke mingles with the frost cloud, a sight I find profoundly unappetizing.
“We’re dining alfresco this afternoon,” says Margaret. “The construction draws so much current our stove is useless. Did Sandy describe our project to you?”
“No. It looks like it’s fairly extensive.”
She motions me forward, then peels back the curtain of plastic. I peek through. The living room walls have been stripped back to the studs and a circular hole the size of a small swimming pool has been cut in the hardwood floor.
