Airport by Arthur Hailey Page B

getting more phone complaints from Meadowood every time there’s a takeoff over there.”
    Mel said grimly, “Meadowood will have to suffer.” Community meeting or not, there was nothing he could do to eliminate overhead noise for the time being. The most important thing at the moment was to reduce the lag in operations. “Where’s Joe Patroni now?”
    “Same place. Still held up.”
    “Can he make it for sure?”
    “TWA says so. He has a phone in his car, and they’ve been in touch.”
    “As soon as Joe gets here,” Mel instructed, “I want to be notified. Wherever I am.”
    “That’ll be downtown, I guess.”
    Mel hesitated. There was no reason, he supposed, why he need remain at the airport any longer tonight. Yet again, unaccountably, he had the same sense of foreboding which had disturbed him on the airfield. He remembered his conversation earlier with the tower watch chief, the line of waiting aircraft on the ramp apron outside. He made a spontaneous decision.
    “No, I won’t be downtown. We need that runway badly, and I’m not leaving until I know positively that Patroni is out there on the field, in charge.”
    “In that case,” Danny said, “I suggest you call your wife right now. Here’s the number she’s at.”
    Mel wrote it down, then depressed the receiver rest and dialed the downtown number. He asked for Cindy, and after a brief wait, heard her voice say sharply, “Mel, why aren’t you here?”
    “I’m sorry, I was held up. There’ve been problems at the airport. It’s a pretty big storm…”
    “Damn you, get down here fast! ”
    From the fact that his wife’s voice was low, Mel deduced there were others within hearing. Just the same, she managed to convey a surprising amount of venom.
    Mel sometimes tried to associate the voice of Cindy nowadays with the Cindy he remembered before their marriage fifteen years ago. She had been a gentler person then, it seemed to him. In fact, her gentleness had been one of the things which appealed to Mel when they first met in San Francisco, he on leave from the Navy and Korea. Cindy had been an actress at the time, though in a minor way because the career she had hoped for had not worked out, and clearly wasn’t going to. She had had a succession of diminishingly small parts in summer stock and television, and afterward, in a moment of frankness, admitted that marriage had been a welcome release from the whole thing.
    Years later, that story changed a little, and it became a favorite gambit of Cindy’s to declare that she had sacrificed her career and probable stardom because of Mel. More recently, though, Cindy didn’t like her past as an actress being mentioned at all. That was because she had read in Town and Country that actresses were seldom, if ever, included in The Social Register , and addition of her own name to the Register was something Cindy wanted very much indeed.
    “I’m coming downtown to join you just as soon as I can,” Mel said.
    Cindy snapped, “That isn’t good enough. You should be here already. You knew perfectly well that tonight was important to me, and a week ago you made a definite promise.”
    “A week ago I didn’t know we were going to have the biggest storm in six years. Right now we’ve a runway out of use, there’s a question of airport safety…”
    “You’ve people working for you, haven’t you? Or are the ones you’ve chosen so incompetent they can’t be left alone?”
    Mel said irritably, “They’re highly competent. But I get paid to take some responsibility, too.”
    “It’s a pity you can’t act responsibly to me. Time and again I make important social arrangements which you enjoy demolishing.”
    Listening, as the words continued, Mel sensed that Cindy was getting close to boiling point. Without any effort, he could visualize her now, five feet six of imperious energy in her highest heels, clear blue eyes flashing, and her blonde coiffed head tilted back in that damnably attractive