I told the cellist I had a particular interest in orientation and flight. In birds, actually. That I was an ornithologist, my wife too; I told her about the study skins and museum collections. She nodded, clenching and unclenching a cocktail napkin in her fist. I rabbited on to fill the empty space, so my voice might be a rope that both of us could cling to; and I told her about polarization filters and magnetic fields, the tiny pebbles, no larger than poppy seeds, found between the skull bones of migratory birds. Magnetite, I said. Black ore, which helps them home, to the same nest or tree across an entire hemisphere. I kept the patter going, reeling and threading out more rope, whatever came to mind, cladistics, the systematics laboratory, how we needed new bird specimens for their DNA (which you couldn’t obtain from the old study skins), and how I collected birds (killed them actually), and that I was going to Amsterdam to deliver a lecture and then visit the Leiden Museum to inspect their collection of Asian Kingfishers. I told her about Ana as well, her work with Savannah Sparrows and migration—but the cabin was growing hotter by the minute, my collar sponged now in sweat, the little hairs on my arms damp. The plane shuddered and pitched and my heart leapt and I could hear the cellist’s breath catch beside me. “Gravity” comes from the Latin gravitas, I explained. Heavy, grave, a lowness of pitch. The impulse of everything toward the earth. Newton’s universal law, Kepler’s “virtue.” Someone vomited in their seat; we heard the vile gurgle, then smelled the sickening odor. The cellist yanked the paper bag from her seat pocket.

Shut up! she hissed.

Was I still talking? I hardly knew. She fished inside her pocketbook and fumbled a tube of lipstick and a hand mirror, and held the trembling glass in front of her face. Her forehead gleamed. She skull-tightened her lips but kept missing, dabbing dots of pigment on her cheeks.

Fuck! she screamed and clicked the compact and tossed it in her purse.

Then she pushed up the cotton sleeve of her black blouse. Her arm was slender and pale. With the lipstick, she composed an E just below her elbow. I watched as she wrote each letter on the inside white of her arm: E, then V, then D, then O.

When she finished it spelled “Evdokiya.”

She handed the opened tube across the cello.

What do I do with this? I asked.

You write your name.

You’re being dramatic.

Am I? she asked.

The name of the lipstick was Japanese Maple. Against her pale skin, the letters looked lurid and blotchy.