“God, I hate flying,” he said.

“Me, too.”

“Fear of dwarfing my surroundings, being accused of gigantism.”

I nodded, then added: “Fear of death.”

In minutes, we took off, hurtling down the bumpy rutted runway with wings and seats and metal joints creaking; then we were airborne, rising slowly into the sky and awkwardly arcing south. The plane shuddered violently and it occurred to me suddenly that I hadn’t moved a muscle or even breathed since we were on the ground at LaGuardia. I would have popped the other half of that Xanax, but the thought only made me more rigid. I waited before even opening my eyes.

It was, technically, a short flight—only fifty-seven minutes in the air, the captain said—and we were nearly ten minutes into it. As the beverage cart approached, the flight attendants dispensed cans of soda and juice, plastic cups of ice and lilliputian foil packets of low-fat pretzel snacks with the poise and pride usually associated with people saving the hungry in famine-racked countries. My seatmate and I resumed our pre-flight conversation.

“So how tall are you?” A lame opening gambit, I knew, but at least I was, as they say, trying to “engage.”

“Six six.”

“My!” I said, my voice seemingly full of wonder and admiration, when, really, what I was thinking was this: Verging on freakish? Receiving my cranberry juice from the flight attendant I tried to make the sudden images of that infamous eight foot seven inch giant man from the Guinness Book of World Records who died too young disappear from my head. Instead, I forced myself to focus on my seatmate’s jeans, his olive wool pullover and his sneakers for the first time. Which made me ask him if he always got asked about whether he played basketball.

“Always.”

“And did you?”

“Never. I was actually a much better football player than I was a basketball player.”

“So is that what you played?”

He shrugged, then smiled broadly, bringing his shoulders up in a cringe position. “May I speak frankly?”

I nodded, expecting more slashing and burning and pillaging fantasies.

“After high school, I never played either sport in college. I was a good enough athlete, but I never had the stomach for it.”

“That’s right. I almost forgot. You’re a pacifist.”

He smiled. “No. I’m a chicken! Those guys were huge! I was afraid!”

I sipped my drink and he sipped his (Diet Coke); the plane dipped and climbed, newspapers were folded, refolded. We exchanged names (Elise, Donald), established that we were both flying home, started to talk about what had made each of us leave New York.

“You go first,” he said.

“Why me?”

“Because I’m eating.” He ripped open a foil packet of pretzel snacks—his third, charmingly extracted from the flight attendant with the finesse of a skilled surgeon or an adorable child. “I’m still growing,” he had said, and she had lowered her bag of goodies like a bowl of trick-or-treat candy for him to pick from. So enamored of him and his appetite, it seemed to me, that I was surprised she continued down the aisle without spending some time sitting on his lap with her tongue in his ear.