His name was Bill Denver and he'd probably chewed tobacco since he was eighteen. His teeth had dark bark-stained ridges close to the gums, barely noticeable to anyone who for the first time was in line for that winning smile. Bill was careful about that smile. He only let a chosen few see it, as if to protect himself with a stern countenance. On a cross-country flight between San Francisco and Pittsburgh, PA, we met. It was a flight between two worlds really, Western comeuppance and Eastern sophistication. Both of us fit within the former scenario. And we each were bent upon our privacy. That's how it began.

"Excuse me . . . I'm sorry . . . could you please reach the overhead compartment for me? I can't get the latch,” I said.

The occupant grudgingly looked up at me from his aisle seat. Mine was the window seat and after asking this ice block to help me stow my luggage I knew I did not want to climb over his legs in a scramble toward my seat. But since there was hardly a choice I grit my teeth into a hard-lined smile and got the job done. We didn't speak or look at each other again until fifteen minutes after lift-off. I don't remember just what prompted us to start talking—something about a broken light button I think—but when we did talk, we didn't stop for the whole five hour trip. Together we belonged to the world of intimate strangers. That's how I came to know about Bill's tobacco habit. Not at first, of course. That secret came out last.

"My husband’s name is Bill, too. Bill and me and the kids—four boys—are moving to California from the Southern Tier—Corning, New York, to be exact. You know, Corning Glass…Pyrex dishes?" I offered as introduction.

He nodded, almost smiling when I said “four boys.” No one had come on board to sit in the seat between us and the food tray became a comfortable parlor table with our elbows resting inches apart as we made hand gestures, noting points of fact. Soon there was no longer any space between us as we chatted.

This carefully tailored, rugged man was a computer systems analyst who worked in California's famed Silicon Valley. With an office in Pittsburgh to handle the company's real estate investments, he made frequent trips back and forth. It just happened he was headed back from the West Coast this week. But all that wasn't what was interesting about him. A job hardly ever is. Bill was close to fifty years old. “I’m forty-eight to be exact,” he said. He looked thirty-five. His sons were all grown except the sixteen year old who lived with Bill's former wife. It was good that the youngest was at home he told me, it would mean she wouldn't be so lonely.

They weren't supposed to get a divorce. Nobody ever is. But it just happened, as uneventful as the nighttime sky. At first, he said, it was the little things. "She stopped looking at me," he said. He told me she had eyes that no longer asked familiar questions, that her gaze wandered and shifted over his shoulder. “She looked away like she was trying to brush away a speck of dust in the distance,” he said. Then he sighed. “Pretty soon the big things were ignored,” he went on, “you know, birthdays and even our eighteenth anniversary.”

Celebrations for the pair turned lonely until there was no reason to even pretend excitement for once happy occasions. Like a child’s neglected toy each felt abandoned and forgotten. He and his wife gradually lived in a world of single words and walled-off indifference. Bill said he eventually turned his vision outward in reply, and they simply ceased to be.

Bill looked reflective for a long moment and said to me in a battle-weary voice, “We both wanted the same thing and neither of us could get it from the other any more. The ‘us’ between us just wore out.”

Neither of us spoke for a few beats. This man sitting next to me had courageously revealed his wounds implicating an imperfect nature—so unlike the crisp white shirt and carefully creased tweed jacket he wore. Yet we were comfortable in the shared silence and when he spoke again it was with straight-faced honesty.

“You won't make friends easily here,” he said. “Californians are into their own thing.” He continued to warn me. “You can live next door to somebody for three years and never see ‘em walk out the front door…real hard to break through. Wish it were different....” He stared straight ahead.

I looked at him skeptically just then, catching a sideways glance of his profile but there was no rancor around his mouth, just a conquered loneliness. There were other signs of the man sitting next to me I consciously decided to study—like his hands. They lay on his lap or waved in the air to make a point revealing long, piano player’s fingers. I thought they had a look of fidelity about them. He gestured with such precision, proving again and again that he was a man of careful considerations. I admired him in that moment and put him in a sacred place I reserved for hard-to-interpret poets.

Our conversation waxed and waned throughout the airline lunch we each purchased, the snack pretzels and the free beverages flight attendants pushed on us. The talk about the divorce drifted aside and we spoke of everyday activities. Everything whirled and blended together and at the end of five hours we were as relaxed as old friends.

“I supply a one percent share of the raisons Sunmaid uses in their California raison boxes,” he told me. “Someday I hope to do business with the wineries, too. Right now the diversion is fun, but in a few years I may turn to it for a real business venture.”

We again started talking about lost dreams and longed-for loves as easily as grade school children sharing crayons. His real secret was Charlotte, his high school sweetheart. They had been steadies in another world where ownership between couples was a ring on a chain around the neck. He laughed at the memory. Incredibly, he and Charlotte had found each other once again, closing the distance of their high school days spent together, making the old prom date an immediate yesterday. His rugged features softened when he spoke of Charlotte and their new plans. He was happy. He was in love. Life was rich.

“What's Charlotte like?” I asked. Then I sat back and listened while he put form to love. Like most lovers he described his Charlottte in elegant, sensuous terms. “She has the most incredible brown eyes,” he said, “they have a softness about them that seem to answer my questions without a word. And her shoulders…they slope with such dignity. That's her most appealing feature,” he said, “her shoulders.” Oh wow, I thought, this man has it bad.

Charlotte and Bill seemed to fit the classic Romance novel profile: high school sweethearts who re-met the ordinary way, at a class reunion. He said they immediately recognized each other across the space of the old high school gym, fitting together like two precious pictures from an heirloom locket lost at recess. “She is imagination to me—a poem whose rhyme I wrote,” he said. It was this discovery of renewed life in something as imperfect as an old romance which captivated me. It suggested they would learn new poetry together, and I felt this was true just by the reverence in Bill's soft, low voice. Like a child's faith, he believed it so.

Pointedly Bill turned and asked me about myself, perhaps feeling guilty about his long monologue. He caught me off guard and before speaking I asked myself, ‘Well what was there to say?’ My marriage was complacent—flat maybe. No ice-fire storms in our twelve years. All I did care to say was, "My married life is steady as a rock." And I looked at him blankly as if to prove my point. I didn’t want to go to the fissures. Right now my heart needed warming from other, much older hurts.

“I have a story,” I finally said. Getting shy and bold all at once I then told him about Lindsey. “Lindsey and I are cousins,” I said. “We’re the same age…we used to worship each other.” My eyes teared as I told him about her.

“As kids,” I said, “we believed in magic tricks, maidens and heroes…” I told him everything about how we convinced each other to believe in the unbelievable stuff of our over-protected lives. I revealed details about our storybook fantasies, bound only by a school girl’s imagination as we romped through our childhood dream-world unguarded and free.

“One summer,” I said, “we sprinkled dime-store glitter on our shoulders, thinking we could fly like Tinkerbell. Luckily my mother caught us before we jumped into the rhododendrons. We were two stories up!” Other hot summer days, I told him, Lindsay and I played the part of ladies of consequence, dressing-up in feathered black hats and our Grandmother’s old stiff black silk dresses. “We put on airs with our stepping-canes and high-heels. Boy we were something,” I said.

Moments spent in our private play world were never enough to last us the whole year, I told him, and at summer's end we had to be torn tearfully from each other's arms, by parents who only partly understood. “Lindsey and I shared all the ingredients of innocent first love,” I said, “until we discovered boys.” Then things really changed, I told him, but not noticeably until we turned sixteen. Lindsey had a crush on a boy named Ricky. But Ricky liked me, not her. “It was awful,” I told Bill. I told him about how I remembered the tears in Lindsey’s eyes when she told me how much she loved Ricky and how could I do this to her? And about how I didn’t know what to do and about the odd feeling I had that day as my tongue lay frozen in my mouth.

“Ricky and I lasted only four months,” I said, “but Lindsey and I were through. Two years later she got tangled up with a married man. I worried, but…even now she never calls…”

Bill's impenetrable face softened. “Did it ever occur to you that she just doesn't want to be friends?” He said, his hand splayed on the tray between us.

Defiantly I shook my head holding onto the stubborn belief that I could make things all right again—today—given the right formula. Bill just looked at me, saddened, and wordlessly said let it go. My eyes held his for a moment too long and I saw in them a skeleton of truth which my own reality would flesh out in years to come. This man, this stranger, knew when to let go, and I didn't.

Just then he broke the spell. In a lighthearted, completely unconscious way Bill pulled out his bag of Redman chewing tobacco. “See, not even my best friends know about this!” He said. We laughed at this indulgence so apart from the rest of the man. This secret he shared with me was safe, I realized, as was the whole of our private world in flight. Upon landing I was to call when I got settled in the Bay Area to help him with some technical writing. (I was inexperienced, but that didn't matter he said, we would learn together how to turn a computer manual into layman's poetry. Please keep in touch!)

The plane landed. My friend Susie met me at the gate. Bill carried my luggage for me and we smiled indulgent, friendly smiles toward one another. I introduced Bill to Susie who quipped, “You even have ‘em carrying your bags for you!” Then Susie and I linked arms and giggled as we headed toward the escalator and the parking lot.

A few steps later I swung around to face Bill for one last good-bye smile and instead was greeted with eyes that leveled cold shots of hurt. Our chance meeting, which had worked for the two of us the whole flight, curled back on itself. The thoughtless girlish laughter had somehow shattered the intimacy between Bill and me and we instantly became ordinary strangers—leaving only holes.