stuart ross – the maternal man

(Excerpt from The Hotel Egypt)

	The plane is three by three. I have an aisle. I always get an aisle. In the aisle across sits a woman in the bright red beret. She’s got an infant at her chest. I sit straight back, giving her space, because she’s talking to the man in the middle seat next to me.
	“Is this your husband?” I ask, pointing at them both. “That your wife? We can switch. So you guys can be together?”
	“We can do that?” the woman asks, in a foreign accent I can’t place.
	“Yeah, sure. I mean, you can always switch aisle for aisle. It’s aisle for window that gets dicey. And aisle or window for middle, well, that’s a no-no. At least in this country.”
	We make the switch. It’s the nicest thing I’ve done in weeks. I fasten my seat belt tight, not half-assed like some punk, and I listen to the safety instructions. The pilot calls herself Jennifer Jones. It was a beautiful day in Seattle, and it will be a beautiful evening in New York. The flight attendants pass out information on how to join the frequent flyer club. I’ve been a member since 2001, but I accept the weighty card stock and scan the benefits I already enjoy. When we reach cruising altitude I wipe tears from my cheeks, put in my noise-cancelling headphones, and listen to the Holy Bible on shuffle, Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. 
	Corinth. A large, unholy mess of a city, home to false prophets and screaming divisions, a cesspool of sexual immorality and—this is pretty hot—Jewish-Christians sleeping with their stepmothers. Thunder cracks. Lions roar. I am calmed by the sound of sandalled feet on oasis grass in this well-produced mp3. 
	Saint Paul teaches us the True Christian is no better than garbage. Not garbage for the landfill, the compost, or the recycling, but that true stench of Christianity: not sure where it goes garbage. Saint Paul tells the Christians of Corinth they need to buckle up. If they’re only working through this life for a first-class seat on the airline to heaven, they’d better be ready to spend their earth-bound layover eating pretzels in coach. 
	Saint Paul asks me to imagine I have the aisle. And the man in the middle seat next to me is married to the woman in the middle seat beside us. Suppose what just happened to me in real life was something way more radical? Suppose this man asked me, during boarding, if I could give up my aisle for his middle, so that he and his wife could sit together? It’s an unfathomable question to imagine an American asking. But if I’m a Christian I give up my aisle. If I’m a Christian I know humanity is in the asking. If I believe in something as zany as the resurrection I say yes to the man, I put myself in that squeeze. If I’m searching for the wounds on the body of Christ like I’m searching for my keys in the dark, I’m at the extremes on the daily. I tell this man I will take his middle. But I am not some meek man. I will fight for both armrests the whole way through. 
	I take stock of my reading materials. Along with the latest Men’s Magazine, picked up at the airport newsstand, I have a novel with me, The Maternal Man, the definitive story of Masculinity in the Trump Era, which I picked up at the anarchist bookshop near Pike Place Market. 
	Masculinity in the Trump era is something I know quite a bit about, so I begin the book with a cloudy mind. Do I really want to read fiction about what I’m living through? I learn that The Maternal Man tells the story of a culturally Jewish professor who moved from Kansas to New York City. The professor loved the Kansas City Royals baseball team in 1985, I loved the New York Mets in 1986—we have something in common. I know this professor. He’s a character type that’s long appealed to me. The only character type I love more than the culturally Jewish professor is the culturally Catholic sex worker with a bitchy spirit. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, the young Jewish professor and the Catholic sex worker team up on the same existential quest. That’s one of my favorite books to sleep on. 
	I try to keep a sunny mind. I read the first few chapters of The Maternal Man. The prose is beautiful. Very intelligent. I relate to that, because I’m intelligent, too. I’m waiting for the young professor, also a young novelist, to get going with being a rakish asshole. When will he tell us he has a thing for Mexican teenagers in sandy thongs at all-inclusive beaches? When will he snort rails of Bolivian Marching Powder? Eat ham off the bone. When will the squiggles of saxophone trip up his gait on a predawn walk under the elevated tracks? When will he start sleeping around with all the beauties New York City has to offer the man from Kansas? When will he make lights-on love with unreliable hostesses, low-performing schoolteachers who keep it all inside, editorial assistants who can somehow afford big city apartments flooded with clarifying, man-hating light? When will he applaud female authors whose minor work he deeply respects, as long as it isn’t about him? 
	My toe is killing me. I shake off the flight attendant’s offer of free pretzels, I am twisted enough, and I buy two clickers of whiskey with a Coke chaser, no need for the full can. I pay with my airline credit card which returns a quarter of the cost of inflight purchases and earns me double miles. I put The Maternal Man down. I fear it is another of those 224-page novels billed as a novel that changes the idea of the novel itself. I sip the minibar whiskey and hum the andantino moderato from Rhapsody in Blue. On a walk to the first-class bathroom, I see a woman eating a snack pack. She’s reading a book called Never Eat Snack Packs Alone: The Proven 8-Step Process to Getting Nothing You Want. I want to ask her if she’d like to trade my book for hers. 
	Back at my seat, I cry at the in-flight movie, relating more to Fix-it-Felix than Wreck-it-Ralph. I puke both bottles of whiskey into the barf bag. The woman in the bright red beret asks if I need help. I tell her I don’t know how to answer that question. 
	“It’s his fault,” I say, looking at the top of the plane.
	“Whose fault?” 
	“My creator. God himself. The coat-check man upstairs.” 
	My stomach settles down. I take a long nap. We’re in our initial descent. I pick up The Maternal Man. When will this prissy sanctimonious near-sighted jerk who has such a way with words meet some withdrawn yet recalcitrant females? I want spiraling reddish hair springing from female scalps, tangling as it widens up and out, cut paperboy fashion in the back, that’s what, and I want hair scrawled out high above a busty woman’s ears. If I didn’t want female hair, I would’ve picked up The Paternal Woman at the anarchist bookstore, another 224-page novel which has changed the way we think of the novel itself, which tells the story of a Jewish woman who is never called ‘Jewish’ who looks at the shadows that are never called ‘shadows’ and sees them as they move for a Jewish woman who has the free time to watch the shadows move as they are and for what they are while she earns a modest stipend from a local university and sells her Sesame Street diaries to the New York Times. But I don’t really have anything to say about female authors. The author of The Maternal Man, on the other hand, I should be able to understand. But he is depriving me. Where is my hair? I want heavy ropes of knotty black hair in this story. I want quivering bottom lips. I want elegant hands and glossy knuckles, heavy and maybe pendulous breasts that heave, and why won’t this soy boy, he would say ‘mollycoddler’ because he’s too good for the internet, give me some dark soft eyes set off by kohl, where are my slow-blinking lashes, ample white backsides, western sloping shoulders, and where the fuck are my folds, dawg, of fleshy voluptuous skin, folds of silken hotel robes—inviting necks, pensive foreheads. But all that gets edited out. Or never written in the first place. The young novelist doesn’t permit garbage in his text—for that he has his Simple Human trashcan from the Atlantic Terminal Target. The professor is a good, nice, young man from middle America with memories and beliefs who sees the world as it is for a good, nice, young man from middle America with memories and beliefs who can afford to play with genre. Now his story fiction, then autobiography, memoir, soon enough childhood fantasy, a seedless florilegium fusion of the new French novel and old German poem winning the great white whale Masters of American Prose Contest. 
	I put down the novel and pick up the inflight mag. I get really into an article by an award-winning chef on the mysterious decline in white America’s sperm counts, and then an article by a retired neurologist on the twelve best food trucks in Cairo. Harrison Ford has still got it and the Canadian rapper Drake doesn’t care what we think. I return my attention to The Maternal Man. I enjoy the experience of reading any novel. Even though I know it won’t be followed by the experience of remembering, or even comprehending, what the novel said, what the novel was in for, and how the novel got out of it. Maybe, if the novel reader is lucky, they remember one idea, one fact, one problem solved, and on the last pages of The Maternal Man the young professor tells the woman he never describes the Latin term for humans who can wiggle their earlobes without touching them. I will never forget that Latin term. One day I’m going to use it at a cocktail party. Page for page, image for image, proprioception to proprioception, I must concede The Maternal Man lived up to its hype. It is the defining novel of Masculinity in the Trump Era. And the textbook example of how the Jewish novel changed its stance on the war against Christmas. 
	No, fuck that. I go to the first-class bathroom, walking right by the weeping Never Eat Snack Packs alone woman, and I rip The Maternal Man to pieces. I ask the flight attendant if he has any Scotch tape. Of all the things I hate about the professor’s triumph, what pisses me off the most is that the professor thinks he’s out of Egypt. He thinks he’s free. He thinks he’s marched. He thinks he gets to be the still small voice at the protest. Maybe he does. He has a different creator than I do, and good for him. No, fuck that. You’re a profiteer, professor, not a prophet. Stop pretending you can interpret the master’s dreams. 


STUART ROSS is the author of The Hotel Egypt and Jenny in Corona — follow his work @myskypager

The Hotel Egypt can be purchased from Spuyten Duyvil or Amazon.


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