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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
A flight attendant helped me out with a stack of paper towels, and my neighbor, a blond guy in a red Huskies cap, very sweetly offered me his seat. I was blotting up the coffee from the cover and pages of my book, whose prose is so beautiful and rich -- yet is it sometimes too pretty? Yes, I think the prose is sometimes too pretty -- that I had underlined about every other sentence, when I couldn't help noticing yet another liquid issue. On the other side of the aisle, above the middle seat, a drop of water hung tremulously on the overhead console. It took several more drops before the passenger on whom the water was dripping seemed to notice. Soon, water droplets were forming above the consoles of several rows of seats, and people were cupping their hands over their heads. This is not something you want to see on a plane. The flight attendant was summoned, and a passenger suggested that the air conditioner was leaking, a suggestion the flight attendant rejected so decisively and defensively that it seemed as if this were her own personal plane. Maintenance guys appeared. Not something you want to see on a plane, either.
Now, I can't really read on planes, or think about anything other than keeping the plane in the air (in my own particular brand of megalomania, I believe that only the power of my own thought is keeping the plane airborne), but, because we were obviously going to be hanging out on the runway for a while, the stress of being airborne was going to be delayed, so I could read again.
The Wapshot brothers seem to revile each other, although I'm somewhat unclear about the nature of their relationship. They both move to big cities, Moses eventually works in a diplomatic job "so secret that it cannot by discussed here" ("WHAT?!?" I wrote in the margins of my book), and Coverly, by far the least-bright of the Wapshot clan, gets a job as a department store stock clerk. Both brothers eventually marry impossible women -- Moses marries Melissa, the ward of another wealthy female cousin, and a probable (in my opinion) lesbian who lives with this wealthy cousin in a mansion so vast no one ever counted the number of rooms, and Coverly marries Betsey, a women even dimmer than he (when Betsey first meets Coverly, she thinks his strident Yankee accent is English). Betsey abandons Coverly for a brief period, and that chapter begins, "And now we come to the homosexual part of the story ..." ("!!!" I wrote in the margin, "Can Cheever really get away with that?" I mean, who or what is the authorial voice in this odd chapter pricis?) In the "Wapshot" cosmology, the men are impotent and utterly powerless. Are the men happy about it? No, the men are not happy. As Coverly says to a psychologist at one point in the novel, "Well, sir, where I come from, I think it's hard to take much pride in being a man."
I was as deep into reading as I could have been expected to be, given that I'm always hyper-aware of any potentially lethal peculiarities when I'm on a plane, even when that plane is still on the runway. So back to our shared watery mystery: The maintenance heroes had a verdict -- apparently some genius had brought a bag of ice onto the plane, and that ice was leaking from several overhead compartments. A male passenger suggested it might be "dry" ice. One of the orange-vested maintenance men said, "Dry ice isn't allowed onboard. Dry ice is a haz-mat!" He pronounced "haz-mat" in that wonderfully flat Chicago accent that usually reassures me, but in this case, with these words, it did not. Then followed some passenger discussion about the properties of dry ice vs. non-dry ice, and a woman piped up and said, "Dry ice doesn't melt, guys."
For reasons unclear, it took more than half an hour to locate the source of the now very steadily dripping water. Flight attendants pulled out bags from the overhead compartments, and the famous ice bag -- which turned out to be a standard-issue rolling suitcase -- was finally sheepishly claimed by an eerie little fellow with shellacked black hair and who was wearing (I swear this is true) a trench coat. He seemed to be surprised that it was his ice, not someone else's, that had been causing so much commotion. I couldn't hear his conversation with the flight attendant, but I imagined him saying, "Oh, you mean that bag with ice." The passengers were from Chicago, so everyone was too polite to ask aloud the question we were all thinking, "What kind of idiot brings ice onto a plane?" (The secondary question: "And what, exactly, is the ice keeping chilled?")
The ice bag was confiscated, and a flight attendant rolled it to the back of the plane. In the time it took for the flight attendants to break up the ice -- such a long and nerve-rattling process that I was no longer imagining a bag of ice cubes, but, instead, a solid ice block -- I finally finished "The Wapshot Chronicle." In the end, the S.S. Topaze sinks, and is humiliatingly turned into a most unmasculine floating gift shop, Melissa's mansion meets a fiery demise, Leander drowns, the crazy wives give birth to sons, and homosexual urges are overcome. In short, the matriarchy is destroyed; the patriarchy triumphs. "The Wapshot Chronicle" seems to me an enormously flawed and erratic book -- the pacing is all wrong, there is zero in the way of plot, or even momentum, much of it is overwritten, a lot of the digressions are uninteresting, and few of the characters -- certainly none of the women -- are, in that favorite term of the leaden critic, "sympathetic." "The Wapshot Chronicle" is, however, sort of a great novel -- or I guess I should say that I often thought it was great -- but it's everything a great novel isn't supposed to be.
None of my premonitions of wet, airline doom turned out to be true, and the watery symbols and signs ended up being merely coincidences. (My bleak air travel premonitions never come to be, so I guess I should stop calling them premonitions.) When the ice had been pulverized, my plane finally took off for New York. I had been keeping a watchful eye on the ice man a few rows up, who was now staring straight ahead at his tray table. Without his ice, he wasn't as interesting. I threw the airline-issued blanket over my head, wondered if I was imagining that smell or if I actually still reeked of coffee, and thought about why "The Waspshot Chronicle" felt like a pick hacking at the ice block of my mind: If John Cheever didn't know how to write a novel, how is anyone else supposed to?
