find two other passengers already sitting in them, and who had been asked by the purser whether they would mind taking the seats in the back row instead, since the other passengers were "very frequent flyers." There was a man in a wheelchair who had been left in the jet bridge for twenty minutes. There was a young woman who had been called "sweetheart" and told to put her bag "in the back with the others" by a passenger in the seat across the aisle, while a flight attendant stood two feet away and said nothing.
Individually, each of them could be explained. A crew member having a bad day. A misunderstanding. A difference in perception. That was how the responses from customer relations had explained them, in carefully apologetic letters that offered miles and regret.
Together, they described something else. They described a cabin in which some people were assumed to belong and other people were required to prove it. They described a crew culture that had quietly learned to defer to the loudest and most valuable customers, and to ask everyone else to be understanding. They described, in other words, a product that was failing at the one thing Naomi had promised it would do, which was to make every person who paid for that seat feel the same way when they sat in it.
She had raised it at the last executive meeting. The chief commercial officer, a capable man named Peter Lindgren who had come to Meridian from a much larger carrier, had listened politely and then pointed out that the complaint rate was less than a quarter of one percent. "It's noise," he had said. "Every premium cabin has it. You can't manage a product to the worst-case anecdote." The head of inflight services had said that she would look into additional training. Harold Kessler, who was not at the executive meeting but who heard about everything, had called her the next day and said, in his gentle way, that he hoped she was not going to make Thursday's vote about this. "The numbers are good, Naomi. Let the numbers carry it."
She had thanked him for the advice. Then she had asked Lena to book her a seat on Flight 247 from New York to London on Tuesday morning, in her own name, with her own credit card, with no internal flags on the reservation.
"No PAD code?" Lena had said. Positive space, airline-director, the code that would light up the reservation on every agent's screen and tell the crew that someone from headquarters was on board.
"No code."
"They'll find out the second you walk on the plane. Half the crew base knows your face."
"Some of them do," Naomi had said. "Most of them don't. And the passengers don't."
Lena had looked at her for a long moment across the desk. Lena was forty-four, Nigerian-born, raised in Houston, and she had worked in airline operations for twenty years before she came to work for Naomi. She knew exactly what Naomi was doing and exactly why, and she did not think it was a good idea.
"You want to see it for yourself," Lena had said.
"I want to see it the way they see it."
"And if you do see it? What then? You going to fire somebody at thirty-five thousand feet?"
"I'm not going to fire anybody," Naomi had said. "I'm going to sit in my seat and fly to London and write it down. That's all."
Lena had not believed her. Naomi was not entirely sure she believed herself. But she had booked the seat. 2A, a window on the left side of the aircraft, in the second row of the Signature cabin. Naomi had picked it herself on the seat map, a week ago, because it was the seat she had sat in on the inaugural flight eleven months earlier, the morning the cabin launched, when she had stood in the aisle with a glass of champagne and given a short speech to a cabin full of journalists and invited guests about what it meant to her that an airline her father had started with two old propeller planes was now flying people across the Atlantic in a cabin like this.
She had told them a story that morning. She had told them about her grandmother.
* * *
Ruth Morgan had cleaned airplanes for a living for nineteen years.
She had started in 1966 at the airport in Atlanta, for an airline that had long since been absorbed into another airline and then another, so that its name now existed only in the memories of old pilots and on the occasional coffee mug at a flea market. She had worked the overnight shift. When the last flights came in from New York and Chicago and Miami, she and the other women on the crew would climb the rear stairs with their buckets and their rags and their bags for trash, and they would go through each airplane row by row, picking up newspapers and peanut wrappers and the occasional lost glove, wiping down the tray tables and the armrests, vacuuming the carpet in the aisle. They had forty minutes for a narrow-body. They had an hour for the big ones.