Flight 69: The Mile High Club
There's nothing like flying business class. It's just so...sexy. You feel…reckless. You feel, like, this is where I belong. You read in self help books you are what you think you are, what you believe yourself to be. And it's true. I hadn't yet left but I felt like I'd arrived.
It's the little things you notice. Everyone in business class is real polite. There's more space. Champagne in a crystal glasses. Food on plates, not plastic dishes. They bring you little presents, like slippers and an eye mask. Then there's the chocolates wrapped in gold foil.
As to what happens when the lights go out and you're a mile high over the mid-west, that's another story…
But first thing first.
A company driver drops me at the airport. It's coming up to 7.00 i n the evening when I step through the sliding doors and enter the departure lounge with its blaring messages and people rushing by with luggage carts . There's a million people lining up looking lost and ill-tempered. Kids are running around. Women are hunting through overstuffed bags. Men stand there with gritted teeth and weary expressions that seem to say: what have I done – or, rather, what have I failed to do that's left me hanging about watching that business class babe not a day over twenty-six as she wriggles by in her tight dress, cinched-in coral jacket and black Monolo Blahnik's with a single strap and silver toes.
That's me, heels clip clopping like a pony, pink lipstick to match my jacket and Ray Bans resting on my brow to hold my wayward nut brown hair in place. Below the dress, I'm wearing black, lace-front itzy-bitzy briefs and a gorgeous matching bra with plenty of thrust and lift – stupid, I know, for a flight, I mean, no one was going to see them, but that business class ticket made me do it.
A skycap follows – his name, he's told me, is Ivan, and he looks terrible, with bloodshot vodka eyes and a long scar down his left cheek. He's pushing a trolley with a suitcase full of folded business suits and two giant duffels crammed with clothes, cosmetics, a couple of new bikinis from the end of summer sale at Bergdorf Goodman – it's still hot, hot, hot in Houston, and, of course, my shoes. It's my one fetish, my only extravagance. I love shoes and I was taking them all, an echo of all the footsteps that had brought me to where I was today: in business class.
With the eyes following my stately progress, I glide into the "Business Class Only" line and sigh with a strange sense of something. The girl behind the counter at Business is the prettiest member of the staff, they always are; check it out. Anyway, she smiles warmly like we're sisters in the same club.
'Ticket, please?' she says in a sort of apologetic voice as if you're not really the sort of person who should have to bother with such things.
Ivan dumps the luggage and vanishes with his insanely generous tip – what goes round comes round, as my dad always says. I reach for the suitcase, but the man who has come up behind to join the line heaves it up on to the scales. That's the sort of thing that happens in business class. Everyone's so...classy, so courteous.
And he's also fantastically good looking with the bluest blue eyes I've ever seen.
'Can I?' he says.
'No, that's okay...' Too late. He's done it. 'Thanks, that's great, thanks...'
Remember, Kelly, you're in business class. Toss your dark hair, turn your head to one side and smile like this is the sort of thing that happens every day.
Of course, it isn't.
I'd been working in the PR department for a 'big name' soft drinks company in the New York office for three years and had finally been promoted to head up the team in Houston. Texas sales had gone down 'exponentially,' as my boss p ut it. My job was to drive them up again.
I'm not exactly sure why he had put me into business, especially as there had been massive cut backs since the crisis, and had reached the conclusion that it was a sort