The young man and the older married woman in “Airplane”

The young man and the older married woman in “Airplane” are lovers whose closeness never becomes a settled account of what they mean to one another. He is twenty; she is seven years older, married, and the mother of a four-year-old daughter. Their affair unfolds in quiet domestic rooms, through crying, sex, coffee, and speech that repeatedly falters. Its importance lies less in a decision or declaration than in the pressure intimacy places on each person’s private, unspoken life.

Identity and Circumstances

At the time of their relationship, the young man has just turned twenty. The woman is twenty-seven, married, and raising a daughter. Her husband works for a travel agency specializing in overseas trips and is away for nearly half of each month, visiting places such as London, Rome, and Singapore. The young man encounters the husband’s ordered world through the opera records arranged on the shelves at home: Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti, and Richard Strauss. He has never heard opera, while the woman says she does not hate it but finds it too long. The stereo beside the records remains unused; she does not know where its power switch is, and he never tries to turn it on.

The woman insists that her marriage is not unhappy. Her husband is good to her, she loves her daughter, and she thinks she is happy; she says this calmly, without sounding as if she is defending herself. The young man cannot reconcile that account with their affair. He wonders what it means for something to be wrong in a marriage, and considers asking why she sleeps with him if she is happy. He does not ask, partly because he is sure the question would make her cry. The relationship thus begins from a contradiction that the lovers leave intact rather than resolve.

Intimacy and Repetition

Crying becomes one of the relationship’s recurring patterns. The woman cries for a long time, making small sounds, and the young man usually cannot tell why. Comfort does not seem to end it; the crying stops only after a certain amount of time has passed. Often, after she has finished, she initiates sex. At other times he initiates, and she may silently refuse, her expression ending the matter without anger or argument. He sometimes feels relief at the refusal. They sit together over coffee instead, speaking quietly and in fragments, with little in common to discuss and little that he later remembers of their conversation.

Their meetings are organized around the limits of her family life as well as their private desire. After making love, she looks at the black clock radio beside the bed to check whether it is time for her daughter to come home from kindergarten. The young man has seen the child only once and remembers her simply as sweet. He has never seen the husband. A train passes the window whenever the woman checks the clock, an uncanny recurrence that binds a practical act of keeping time to the affair’s enclosed, secret rhythm.

One May afternoon, after they have made love, the woman asks about the young man’s habit of talking to himself. Beforehand she locks the door, closes the curtains, and brings the telephone to the bed. The doorbell rings several times, but she ignores it; the caller eventually leaves. The young man wonders whether she has become involved with him because she cannot cry alone and needs someone to cry in whose arms. He cannot know whether this is true, and the relationship offers no direct answer. Her tears, their physical closeness, and the unanswered door remain adjacent facts rather than an explanation.

Speech, Silence, and the Past

The woman explains that her mother punished her for talking to herself. Her mother said a young lady should not do it, locked her in a dark, moldy-smelling closet, and sometimes struck her knees with a ruler. The punishment worked: she stopped completely, until even if she had wanted to speak to herself, she could not. Now, she says, swallowing words has become a reflex. Her mother is dead, and the woman regrets not asking why she treated her that way. She wonders what is wrong with talking to oneself, describing it as words naturally coming out of the mouth.

After a train passes, she offers an image of the heart as a deep well whose bottom nobody knows; a person can only imagine what lies there from the things that occasionally float to the surface. The image gives form to the couple’s way of being together: each encounters fragments of the other, but neither can reach a complete account of what is hidden. The young man asks what he says when he talks to himself. She writes her answer slowly on a piece of notepaper, keeping her pen moving without pausing for a word. He watches her lashes, still wet with tears, and feels a strange sense of loss. He fears that sleeping with her may mean he can never go anywhere else, that his self might melt away. In his own mind he is as young as newly formed mud, talking to himself as if reciting poetry.

The written answer is not reproduced in the supplied account of their relationship; its significance is registered through his response and the silence that follows. The young man senses in the kitchen the afterimage of something lost, something for which he has no memory. He and the woman sit without speaking as their coffee grows cold and trains pass. Their shared attention turns to an airplane his heart is making deep in a forest: its size, shape, paint, destination, and possible passenger. The airplane is imagined as waiting for someone, but the passage does not make it a plan the lovers undertake together. It remains an inward image, held between them without being explained.

Change and Significance

Soon afterward, the woman cries twice in one day for the first time; it is also the last time she does. The young man reaches across the table and touches her hair. Its feel seems intensely real to him, yet also distant. This small contact gathers the relationship’s central tension: physical intimacy can be immediate and concrete even when its meaning remains remote. The lovers share rooms and bodies, but not a clear explanation of the marriage, the tears, or what their affair asks of either of them.

The framing of the memory sets this intimacy beside other passages about youth, history, and time. A retrospective voice recalls reaching twenty during the student movement of the 1960s, while another remembered life turns on the decision to leave a hometown haunted by a friend’s death. Elsewhere, a young man considers whether a woman belongs among the three women who will have real meaning in his life. These contrasts do not establish a shared plot between those relationships and the lovers in “Airplane”; they give the story’s attention to age and memory a wider resonance. Here, the woman’s twentieth birthday is past and the young man’s is present, but their difference in age matters less to him than the irreducible differences between individual people. Their affair remains defined by that gap: close enough for tears, touch, and a shared imagined airplane, but not close enough to make the hidden depths fully knowable.