IRST CLASS By ,isa Kinoshita Illustration by Louise Williams How I WENT ON MY SUMMER VACATION "TJ L never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train," said Oscar Wilde. I too carry a journal on the road, though mine is a reporter's notebook, .a spiral-bound tabula rasa that records my own encounters ever so sensationally and attempts to compensate for a truly inspired ineptness with cameras (no jokes about Japanese tourists, please). I set out for Europe twice last year: to witness the Palio, a medieval horserace in Siena, Italy; and to report on the lavishly restored Venice Simplon Orient Express (VSOE). Iwas thus initiated into the rarefied world of first class air and rail travel. For someone who had always traveled economy (you know the class- flotation devices are extra), the means of transport quickly became as intriguing as the ends of each journey. On the Orient Express the means are the ends. Between stories I shuttled around between countries, and began to mull over the getting-there, as opposed to the being- there of travel—to consider the psychic miles logged. Untold millions travel greater distances than I each year, to more exotic destinations than Tuscany and Paris. Of trendy vacation spots, a friend advises Vietnam tops the list. This does not presume, however, that sheer physical distance will present one with more pivotal life experiences than will a trip to the corner laundromat at a certain hour of the morning. Why then, I wondered, do people pay such exorbitant sums to simply close the . distance between point A and point B? My intent is to demystify the cachet of first class, having found, paradoxically, that the more one pays for the privilege (of privacy? insulation?), the less distance one travels emotionally. Or so it seems to an instant expert. Who Gares? P icture yourself on a plane. You read the in-flight magazine, pay homage to the usual spectres (air disasters, wind shear, Abu Nidal, KAL 007, the Mile High Club), make up bizarre stories about the person next to you. You try unsuccessfully to sleep. Eventually your mind wanders forward to the ironed curtain. Who’s sitting in first class, and what do they get that practically doubles the price of coach airfare? Do sloe-eyed women supplant tidy stewardesses, offering olives and grapes from undulating navels? Do sculpted men with accents perform acupressure on soft, pink feet? Does the in-flight movie promise to be more in line with Mona Lisa than Rambo? Does the food set before you bear a more specific appellation than mystery meat? Gradually the curtain separating the classes assumes the silken, opaque qualities of a veil. Yet what you conjure up is infinitely more interesting than the activity up front. To break the fortune R a il travel creates a fleeting community a secret society within a cabin of four to six people. Time to break bread and pass the mineral water. Play international charades. Speak in tongues. Talk with your eyes. cookie, first class is a big yawn. Settled but unsettling, it creates a weird ambience: part airborne livingroom (Dorothy’s house whirling to Oz from Kansas), part corporate boardroom. The best part is boarding and disembarking, when you realize that passengers in economy are speculating upon your position in life. Don’t expect to find out much about your - upper-echelon fellow travellers. People don’t talk in first class. Bo-o-o-ring. The food service is another story: it’s the gastronomical equivalent of an elephant gun. On TWA Royal Ambassador first class, there is a layout of foods one would expect at a Republican fundraiser—fussy little hors d’oeuvres, pates, scampi, rack of lamb—and as much gratis liquor as it takes to put one out for nine or ten hours. Perhaps most elite flyers are paying for psychic inertia. It’s a brightly wrapped candy for plebes like me. It’s nice—the Laurent Perrier champagne that greets passengers from New York to Paris, the slippers, choice of newspapers, and nifty traveling kit. But excessive. One is, after all, en route somewhere, not arriving at the destination. And if Something Should Happen, the airborne country club will drop from the sky just as fast as the rest of the plane. Clinton St. Quarterly 27
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