ESSAY – JUNE 2008

By Joshua Bodwell

“Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living.” Antoine de Saint-Exupér.

A few weeks ago, I arrived home from my third trip to work as writer-in-residence at a boy’s prep school in southern London. As I sat in the airport, waiting for my flight to Boston, I thought about my first time on English soil: it was a five-hour layover at Heathrow on a flight home from Milan, after spending ten days sitting by older brother’s hospital bed in Nice, France.

That day, so many years ago, I sat in an airport bar for the entire five hours with a guy I had met on the plane. The bar was a little courtyard area decorated to look like a traditional English pub. Old pictures lined the wall behind the barkeep, pictures of white-bearded old men flanking the bar with pints of beer in front of them. And there were sports photos, shots of men playing football in a different era. The photos looked suspiciously fake. The barkeep noticed me staring at them and smiled. I smiled back and ordered the first round.

The guy from the airplane took long, deep drinks from his pint, as though he drank in this bar every day of his life. I sipped slowly at my dark stout. Eventually we started buying these little grilled sandwiches that were filled with cheese and meat or cheese and tomatoes.

Thinking back, I can no longer remember the guy’s name.

Over those first pints, I told the guy about my brother’s accident: how he had lost control and the car had spun off the road, how the guardrail had come through the car door looking for flesh and pinned him down, how my brother had been in too much pain to be scared. I didn’t get very far into the story; the growing tightness in my throat constricted the words.

We finished our beers in silence. Then the guy, who was from California, bought another round of stouts. I drank easily from the second beer and looked out the large airport windows and across the tarmac. The day moved toward afternoon, and the light was waning. I turned back, and, for a moment, it seemed as though I was sitting in a small English pub. The noise of the place suddenly hit me. Twenty minutes later I got up and bought us another round. The guy bought us another soon after, and it went on like this for a while.

“I walk into a room sometimes,” the guy said suddenly, “and I can’t even remember what I was doing, why I walked in there in the first place.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s my son,” he said, “I miss my son.”

He told me that he had been in Milan visiting his ex-wife and son. He had moved from California to Italy five years ago with this woman who was now his ex-wife. They had moved because she was Italian, and the man had found an accounting position with a large Italian corporation. After less than a year in Milan, his wife had given birth to their son. Six months later she told him that she didn’t love him anymore. He soon quit his job and moved back to California, where he couldn’t find work for three months and was forced to move in with his parents.

“How does this sort of thing happen?” he asked me. I had nothing to say. I still remember, though, the feeling in my stomach—it was as if I was on a rollercoaster dropping from great heights. I remember thinking: How does this sort of thing happen?

“Damn,” I said, shaking my head like a fool. In that moment, I had nothing to say. But looking back on it now I realize that just being there, just listening, was enough.

“My son is growing up without a father,” the guy said, tears in his eyes. “And now my ex-wife is dating this Italian guy.” He said that his son would speak both English and Italian in the same sentence. He said it confused him, made him somehow proud and sad at the same time.

Then, very suddenly, he said, “Never mind this. Forget I said any of this.” He got up and bought us another round. When he came back with two more pints of warm stout, it was as though our conversation hadn’t happened.

We sat there, silent, for a long time and drank our beer. I thought of my brother, alone now in a hospital bed in a foreign country. It was nearly dark out by then, and the airport had grown busier. People were bustling around us; the whole place was throbbing with humanity: flights to catch, paperbacks to buy, duty-free items to splurge on, bored children running laps up and down the aisles. And we sat there, silent.

I was only 22. I couldn’t wait to get home.