The merger talks are going downhill, and by day seven, I figure that it’s all a bomb. Lucio, the bigwig behind the other firm, is starting to look bored in our meetings and say things like, “But what about the profit-sharing?” and that’s my cue to offer a full-out buy. “If he starts talking about profits and all that crap,” my boss told me back in the Apple, “you write a number down—a good number, none of the overpricing you pulled last job—and give it to him. He don’t take it, you just walk and we call it all off.”
So I write a number on a napkin—we’re meeting in the executive room at Galileo’s, discussing business over a growing number of cocktails—hoping that he’s bombed enough to sign off.
          Lucio looks at the number and the tight bags under his eyes go slack and I know I’ve got him. Before he can look at me again, I’m pushing an agreement across the glass table and reaching for my pen.
          He signs.

#

         This means that I’m out of L.A. now—the triumphant deal-maker returning home. It’s a nice feeling, and as I rise out of the dirty brown clouds that mask the city and LAX below me, I lean back in the fat leather first-class chair and raise my empty shot glass at the flight attendant.
         She leans over me—the glass is in my right hand, and I’m in the aisle seat—to take the shot glass from me, and I catch a deep valley of smoky cleavage and a small whiff of Opium. I flick my eyes up and she’s studying me with a small, dirty smile—dirty as the smog below.
         The whole flight she’s doing this to me—leaning over, flashing small vees of skin, brushing my knee as she passes—and I think about the woman in the parking lot and know that this is what she’s missing: the little pleasures, like being seduced gently by a woman who could be fired for touching you; like seeing the shock in the eyes of someone like Lucio, who you were sure was beyond shocking; even the dismaying moments, like discovering that your favorite vice is gone, vanished, leaving you with a good memory and unfulfilled hopes.
         It’s all life, lady, I wish I could say, but she would disregard me and look at her watch and think of all the things she could be doing if her life weren’t running recklessly away from her. There’s a song that plays for people like me, and it’s always jazzy and pretty, and there are songs that play for people like her, and they’re always low and threatening and urgent, and until you get to the point where you figure out that nothing means anything, and everything means something, it’s always a funeral march.
         If I get off in New York and this flight attendant brushes her breasts against my upper arm and whispers that she’s got a two-hour layover, I’ll smile and carry her home in my cab, and we’ll undress like whispers in the darkness of my apartment. If she doesn’t, well—that’s part of the thrill: not knowing, and not caring.